NOK's evolutionary path, Q's move Friday and random notes on HDR, in no particular order:
1. The battle for wireless data supremacy is at hand and we got us the Scandanavians (again), and Rotomola (again), up against Dr. J (again). Anybody been to this movie?
For anyone who is not yet clear after engineer's post, this is the screenplay: In the original, the evil Hagfish cuddles up to CDMA under cover of the 3G standards dispute, supports vaporware W-CDMA, claiming it as its own international standard before the ITU, trashes Q in the press and squares off against Irwin in court in Texas, all the while preparing the you-know-what papers on the battle ship Missouri. The key is it began supporting CDMA under subterfuge.
In the sequel, the stubborn Nordic NOK Oye manfully struggles to come in from the cold and master the universe with its own chips--but there is no 3G dispute to cover its need to make CDMA ASIC peace with the Q--NOK will go its own way. And then along comes MOT ("and along came Jones...."alto sax riff)with 1xrt Plus, which by press release fiat "builds upon the base of 1xrt...(only better, of course). Voila, NOK's subterfuge has been ready made and it slides under MOT's umbrella for political cover--the critical first step is now public.
Only the Q is preparing to make commercial 1xrt chips right now (for commercial intro roughly calendar Q1/01).
2. No matter that Pete Peterson of Prudential Volpe said that "We think that there was some misunderstanding..." in explaining the reason for Q's rise on Friday. (Cooters post #7425) 41 million shares traded. There was no misunderstanding. Even if some may have thought that NOK's president said NOK was prepared to buy Q's ASICS (which he did not--and Irwin said at the meeting--NOK, not yet), there was no misunderstanding. THE FIX IS IN. As Sulpizio said, "we're gonna get you..."
3. On HDR: I managed to collar both Dr. J and A. Viterbi after the meeting. Neither recalled any negative response or reaction from US West on specific HDR trials. Recall, there was some bile spread early last fall concerning a supposed thumbs down on HDR. According to Q's leaders, the vendors' and carriers' reaction has been uniformly positive.
4. Viterbi said that 2.4 Mbps in a mobile environment had been achieved (this surprised me, as I thought the max. 2.4 Mbps rate was for fixed environment and that maximum mobile throughput was somewhat lower). Viterbi said that the challenge that Q's ASIC team was dealing with was attempting to maintain an AVERAGE 1Mbps rate in the face of throughput degradation factors such as numbers of users per cell and other factors.
Steve |
