Good news, Jim.
I like the way IDC is becoming more proactive in highlighting the fact that it has TDMA and CDMA patents. Brian Kiernan did a great job of demystifying TDMA and CDMA on the 2 Radio Wall Street programs.
Obviously, TDMA is going to be a source of revenues for a long time to come and it should be apparent to the casual investor that the TDMA/GSM part of the 3g TDMA/GSM-WCDMA or CDMA2000 air-interface is also going to be a source of revenues especially since Nokia, which currently has 24-25% of the global market, is expected to grow at 30-40% annually over the next 3 years and, by one estimate, eventually grab 40% of the 3G market.
What is really curious is the fact that none of the Qualcommers spending an explicable amount of time on this board picked up on the tidbit presented by Phil Redman of the Yankee Group in that RadioWallSTreet series that NTT DoCoMo and Samsung are working on what may be a 2g CDMA to 3g WCDMA project. This is nothing new and it matches the statesman-like 2g GSM to 3g CDMA2000 effort by Lucent and Nortel, but given the serious haggling going on over in South Korea, it's amazing that nobody has acknowledged the outside possibility that QCOM's largest market (50-60%) has QCOM by the stones.
At the end of the day, technology is very important, but relationships are just as important especially in global telecom where the symbiotic relationship between top-tier manufacturers, supercarriers and ordinary carriers must be respected.
500,000 or so handsets are sold daily around the world, more 2G TDMA than 2G CDMA. That speaks volumes to those who understand that technology is only a tool and vastly superior economic dynamics will always beat marginally superior technology at the 500 million, 750 million and 1 billion wireless industry milestones. |
