Right, Brian. We'll see about the W-CDMA licensing fees when the terms are officially announced. Not a day sooner. I'm not going to run around spreading rumors like certain people close to Qualcomm. If you really believe the widely circulated claims that Qualcomm will get a 5% licensing fee of all W-CDMA equipment manufactured, by all means keep your money invested in Q. However, the Ericsson-Q agreement is *not* some industry-wide acknowledgment of the size of Qualcomm's licensing demands on W-CDMA. That's a pipe dream.
There are half a dozen companies claiming to be "a leader in W-CDMA". Nokia has key W-CDMA development deals with leading companies in China, Korea and Japan - the three most crucial markets in early deployment of W-CDMA. That's a fact. I wouldn't listen to the spin so much as pay attention to what companies have landed the support of NTT-DoCoMo, Korea's biggest CDMA operator and China's most influential mobile technology development unit. W-CDMA licensing fees have not been set and they will have to be reasonable to all companies holding IPR.
As far as technology issues are concerned, you might find out that the biggest commercial technology break-throughs in 2000 are Bluetooth, EPOC, WAP and GPRS/EDGE. Most investors miss the point of these open standards. The profits their implementation creates are not spread across the industry. They flow to companies that were the earliest, core developers of these technologies and get the products to the market first. Late licensees will have to play catch-up. Those companies who only woke up to WAP and Bluetooth this summer are badly behind. Many manufacturers talk about high data rates. But almost 30 operators have now started implementing GPRS. The operators are talking with their wallets. Money talks - rest is spin. Of course there are dozens of people badmouthing GPRS in Geneve - they're running scared because the financial momentum is impressive.
Darrell - it's common knowledge that the most recent GSM gear can now offer 12-15 times analog performance. And that's going up. The IS-95/GSM performance gap in the real world bears no resemblance to the gushy PR material descriptions. You might want to talk to Vodafone engineers on this topic. They usually have some interesting stuff to say - and they are seeing the real performance of these standards, since the company operates both kinds of networks.
Quincy - Sprint's text message service is breaking down weekly in some area or another. Sometimes the messages get delivered 6 hours late, sometimes 24 hours late, sometimes they apparently vanish. Telecom Italia Mobile is now handling 3 million text messages a day. And let me tell you - that level can't be reached without reliable, speedy service. Once customers lose their trust in mobile text messages as a viable alternative to e-mail, it's pretty hard to get it back.
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