Richard,
CDMA in general (wide OR narrowband) still has a problem with acceptance (witness the on/off again situation in China) in relation to GSM
China Telecom and China Unicom have over 35-40M GSM subscribers. China Unicom has around 5M GSM subs but less than 1M CDMAOne subscribers in 4 trial sites operated by Motorola, Lucent, Nortel and Samsung. All 4 manufacturers have TDMA and CDMA products so they will go with what the carriers want. Ericsson, for example, just cut a GPRS/technology transfer deal with China Unicom even though it bought the QCOM infrastructure business with $400M of vendor financing to be provided by QCOM. Also, there are some people on RB claiming that China has developed its own TD-SCDMA which is a moot point given the chip-level system integration trajectory of the communication IC business.
2. Even with CDMA acceptance, QCOM has already won the day since narrowband CDMA seems to be the more accepted standard
Define winning. QCOM won the uncontested race to 2G CDMAOne (IS95). QCOM PR has successfully wedded itself to the image that 2G CDMAOne IS also 3G CDMA, but the facts do not back up that claim, which should be more properly seen as posturing even though it has done wonders for the stock. The underlying business is off to an underperforming start already. The irregular pattern of Newbridge Networks performance over the last 7 quarters comes to mind except that expectations are higher in QCOM's case over a longer period of time.
Globally, Analog and TDMA have 60+M subs in 44 countries. GSM, a variant of TDMA, has 220+M subs in 142 countries. CDMAOne only has 50+M subs in 35 countries with more than half in South Korea. No contest. There are 30M analog subscribers that QCOM has not been able to convert to 2G CDMAOne so that tells you a lot of things.
There are at least 5 companies with IPRs in IS95 (2G CDMAOne) and more and more people are starting to verify the fact that there are between 5 to 7 alternative sources of complete 3G WCDMA IPRs. Notwithstanding its lawsuit with IDC for 2G TDMA/GSM, there is enough information in the public domain to suggest the strong possiblity that Ericsson, Motorola, ATT Wireless, Nokia, IDC, Golden Bridge and maybe some others looking to break into the top 5 are going to coalesce around a 3G WCDMA platform that will already start to scale into 4G.
Note that IDC and Golden Bridge share a common link in Donald Schilling. His 50 or so broadband CDMA patents at IDC and his 9 or so patents at Golden Bridge, which has a licensing agreement with ATT (TDMA), are supported by a high-powered and pioneering intellectual paper trail in spread spectrum technology that dates back all the way to 1960. The conjecture is that Nokia is the vendor most aggressively using elements of both complementary technologies to develop the TDD (time division duplex) version of spread spectrum that will span 3G and 4G. There are 8 REAL WORLD WCDMA trials going on to only 1 CDMA2000 trial (SKorea).
It should go without saying but, do your own research. We have to restate the obvious around here more times than is necessary, actually. <g>
Gus |
