CDMA land hasn't stood still! Clinton bombed China which put the kibosh on CDMA there for a while. Ericy caved in and Bill Frezza was proven wrong wrong wrong. Liar Ramqvist did NOT tell his customers they couldn't have it contrary to "...we will deny them that request". Ericy took a pounding while Q! soared in 1999. Even China isn't a totally lost cause though things are slow there. Eventually China will use CDMA but it will probably be in the cdma2000 or W-CDMA versions [not that W-CDMA is going to be different from cdma2000 since the two are growing increasingly similar].
China celebrated 50 years of communist rule with a Nuremberg rally type display but with some more attractive colours during the less militaristic type displays. Silly Jiang Zemin drove around in a car shouting "Sieg" while the crowd shouted back "Heil" but looking like a joke. New Zealand and Britain forgot about Magna Carta and all that freedom stuff and thugged into silence anyone who waved a flag of an unapproved colour so that the chief thug of China wouldn't be offended and place his business elsewhere. Will appeasement work this time? Last time it was not long before Poland was invaded. Taiwan should keep their rockets fueled and military well financed and trained. Still, freedom is pretty thin on the crowd anywhere these days. State power is at an all time high anywhere I can think of.
That's fitting though, because IT [the Web writ large and with its own sense of being, controlling us as much as it serves our purposes in a weird symbiotic relationship] will be coming early in the new millennium and governments will wilt before IT. Already I owe my income to IT. A citizen not of the world, but of IT. I hope IT doesn't cut off my credit card for writing mean things about IT abusing power. They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. What will be the countervailing force? I suppose the dichotomy between the 3D agents for IT [us] will provide the balance.
Anybody want to join a human union to provide balance against IT? Maybe the UN will morph from a geographical Nation State shambles to the human representation against IT.
Back to the more prosaic. CDMA in Los Angeles and all of USA is now the official winner of the cellphone stakes. NextWave Telecom is in a war with the FCC. Congress, Nextel and others are all swarming on the sidelines and running on to the pitch to join in. Huge telecom deals such as Worldcom buying Sprint show the financial stakes involved. Seems that the spectrum might actually be worth about what NextWave originally bid though the courts have so far awarded the spectrum at the cheaper bankruptcy price.
Leap Wireless share price is showing the level of interest in the whole field. The CDMA tsunami is roaring across the USA now and 2000 will see uproar as cdma2000 precursor HDR makes inroads and analog starts dying off as people switch in millions to CDMA.
Korea is off and running on high data rates and Web devices are being launched in Japan too.
Technical developments are going faster than anyone can keep up with even if that's all they do. Telecom99 was a swarming multitrillion$$$ focal point for the planet. Just the show cost $billion or two. It looked like the start of a nuclear chain reaction happening. 1000s of companys and millions of individuals are now swarming all over CDMA and trying to get a piece of the action. To be first, best, cheapest, fastest and broadest band.
This is going to make all the technology developments in all of human history look trivial. The whole industrial revolution will look trivial compared with the electronics/photonics communications, information and neural networks engulfing the planet. Okay, that's a slight understatement, but the scale of what's happening is hard to describe.
And that's before DNA Engineering [TM] gets into gear. CDNA [TM] will make CDMA look an interesting sideshow. CDNA [Cyber Deoxyribonucleic Acid] and CDMA between them are going to change what it means to be human. Get ready for a rapid punctuated equilibrium transition in human evolution - let's hope we don't get punctuated against our will [if we are quite clear on what our will means - jfred reckons we have a free one but freedom continues to elude me so I'm not convinced].
Back to CDMA, "Will you get rich from CDMA?" Well, Irwin shot past the $billion mark and masses of Qillionaires were created in 1999. A shame Fortune's 400 richest Americans edition got a photo of somebody else instead of Dr Jacobs. Not a big problem I suppose but it shows Qualcomm is not pre-eminent in public consciousness yet. Who would print a picture of somebody instead of $ill Gates, even if they had the same name? Give it another year or two and CDMA and Qualcomm will be much better known.
Congratulations to Dr Jacobs and the crowd at Qualcomm for their brilliant achievements.
Back to the technical developments. SiGe remains in the wings. The pdQ is out and running but with lots of competition. The ThinPhone has been a wild success. High Data Rate is in business [starting]. cdma2000 is gaining ground and W-CDMA has been squeezed up to look little different so that all the doings can be done on one chip for both standards with not much cost and performance penalty [they claim]. CineComm is real and I watched the first movie half a year ago at Pacific Theatres in Los Angeles! Must be under commercial production soon. More and more ASICs keep being developed with no limit in sight - 3G is going to be sooner rather than later and much pandemonium will accompany its introduction as no service provider wants to be last. WirelessKnowledge is still gestating but $ill Gates seems to be talking it up. Wireless Business Solutions is doing much more than OmniTRACS now. The QCell went with infrastructure to Ericsson who will be pushing it all like crazy to get in on the CDMA tsunami. Eudora is quiet but surely Q cyber currency is being secretly prepared. Q! has $1.4bn or so and another $1.5bn will come in from the handset division sale so they could singlehandedly start a decent sort of cyber bank with cyber Q money powerfully encrypted and delivered via Eudora anywhere to anywhere. I suppose the money will go to NextWave and a cdma2000 rollout across the USA. With Leap Wireless joining the fray. They could do both. Raise $10bn to start a Q CyberBank and I bet the money would pour in! [Psst, don't mention it to Microsoft - they have their eye on Qualcomm and this CDMA stuff]. Globalstar is now in business [sort of] and looking good with a wide open technological development road to follow; the first year might be bumpy but then they'll get moving [if they figure out what price elasticity, market clearing and supply and demand mean].
Will buyers at $222 get rich from Qualcomm? Well, there's no limit in sight so this $35bn company could easily become a $200bn company in 5 years. If they keep the pace up, it could well be the first $1trillion company though Microsoft has a very good head start.
That's a brief summary near the end of 1999. I suppose it means things have gone very, very well.
Summer calls.
Au Revoir
Maurice
IT = zygote to zeitgeist [don't get in the way]. |
