Thanks Keith!
BW said that "DoCoMo enhanced the basic CDMA platform with its own homegrown mathematics"..
TOMORROW
Internet cruising speeds will soon get a lot faster on i-mode. More than 300-kbps should be possible by next year. And by 2003, peak speeds could hit two megabits--fast enough for high-quality music downloads, Webcasts of TV shows, virtual-reality games using the phone as a Net link, and real-time videoconferencing.
TODAY
DoCoMo's i-mode cell phone service lets subscrbers swap e-mail and pictures, search phone directories and restaurant guides, and download news, weather, and horoscopes. Users connect to the Net at 9.6 kilobits per second--far slower than a PC on a phone modem. But unlike a PC or other Web-browsing phones, the i-mode systems are always connected to the Net.
Q: Do you have many patents on wideband CDMA?
A: Yes, we do. But the industry now believes that things should be open, fair, reasonable. One should pay money for the technology, since the company that developed it paid for research and development. America backs this view, but then you have Qualcomm charging a high royalty [for its CDMA technology]. Since we don't have a contract with them, I don't know what they're charging, but I've heard it's in the order of several percentage points. What it means is that Qualcomm could take a cut of several percent from the sale of our 3G handsets. But in the case of wideband CDMA, we own some of the technology, as do Lucent and Qualcomm. So it'll be difficult to sort through all the patents. That's why we're calling for more cooperation. In the end, users will have to bear the cost, and we want to keep it within reason.
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