Would someone please take a crack at this (apologies for reposting Benjamin's repost, but this is important):
The main reason appears to be cost, they said. Qualcomm holds patents
for both WCDMA and CDMA2000, but officials at the three companies
said Qualcomm asks for higher royalties than Nokia and Ericsson. "It
would save us money to use Nokia and Ericsson's technology over
Qualcomm's if we decide to use WCDMA," said Won Hong Sik, a
spokesman for SK Telecom.
How can this make any sense at all? In the first place, Won Hong is talking about the price of a product WHICH DOES NOT EXIST, AND WON'T FOR ANOTHER 2/3 YEARS. Second, we have been repeatedly told that the upgrade path from IS95 to CDMA 2000 is CHEAPER, by orders of magnitude, than the upgrade from IS95 to W-CDMA. Last, the CDMA 2000 product is field proven NOW, will be commercially implementable within 12 months or less (engineer, do I have this date right?), and will offer vastly superior data transmission speeds. Therefore, even if the royalty rate on the 1X stuff were higher (which we have never heard confirmed except by Mr. Sik's allegation in this article), woudln't it be reasonable to assume that the higher rate, again if true, would be offset by reduced infrastructure costs and better product quality? Anybody? SM |
