Mike,
<< Your post about Qualcomm was better than mine. Cut that out! >>
Twere not. <g> Your post took much longer to write, and gave me a well organized framework to quickly wing one back.
Some further reflection.
I would like to call your attention to a January article called "Third Generation Mobile: From Perception to Fact" that you may or may not have seen:
telecommagazine.com
Buried half way down at the end of the "Network Costs" paragraph is a chart that depicts the growth and decline of 2G wireless, the growth and decline of 2.5G wireless and the growth of 3G, over the next decade. I happen to think that it is relatively accurate to the degree that anyone can project technology growth out a decade. It does not dissect technologies within the various generations, but of course in 3G, the air interface within technologies is or will be cdma (forget the mode or flavor).
In your earlier post you mentioned that you were a bit disappointed at 4th quarter CDMA growth as was I. I will reciprocate by mentioning the two things that most disappointed me last year about cdma, and this is something I have posted on occasion to the S&P 500 board (not making me the most popular poster there).
I sincerely was convinced about midsummer that there was a possibility of a cdma air interface being incorporated into a 2.5G iteration of GSM. Heck, Perry LaForge said it. Vod had successfully experimented with it. In addition, I thought that there was still a slim possibility of 'T' incorporating a cdma air interface in an enhanced 2G TDMA network.
In August I found out that not only was 'T' fully committed in another direction, that they were in fact going to bypass GPRS altogether other than for testing) and implement EDGE, accelerating the development of EDGE standards and improving its chances for success. In addition the other 2 major regional TDMA networks were feverishly working on standards within the framework of the UWCC.
A month later, on a trip to Europe where I participated in a wireless workshop, it became clear that the GSM community had pretty much completed or had actually completed GPRS air interface standards, and was going to implement GPRS faster, and to a greater degree than I had ever imagined.
The long and short of this is that by year end I had formed the opinion that revenue flow from QCOM cdma IPR and attendant royalties outside of the cdmaOne/cdma2000 current & future network and subscriber bases, would take a bit longer to turn on, than I had originally anticipated.
Perhaps ETSI & the UWCC will still see the cdma "light" within the context of enhanced 2nd generation wireless mobile telephony. We have Vodafone and Hutchinson (and perhaps WCOM) stuck with their feet in both technologies. I'm not counting on it, but I am counting on QCOM to be a great long term hold.
To those that say "GSM is Toast", I reply that I don't think it is, but that it will be "new and improved" with "cdma inside". To which I might add, to me, cdma or CDMA is Qualcomm. All JMO. Time will tell, as Cha2 will say.
BTW: Both your SEBL & QCOM posts of today are permanantly bookmarked in my "Favorites" gorilla folder
- Eric - |
