elmatador, CDMA2000/CDMA (and for that matter TD-SCDMA in China) royalties and WCDMA royalties are the same. You may want to refer to the news article on 7/12 entitled Qualcomm supports 3G deployment where Dr. J. spells it out. It's easy to apperciate how Qualcomm gets the same royalties for either standard. Apparently, Q would not license the CDMA part of WCDMA for any less than their normal rate. And the CDMA part is far and away the most important part of WCDMA because it is the CDMA transmission mode that gives the many hundreds percent spectral efficiency (and power) gains over other methods.
The obvious conclusion, especially with the exhorbitant spectrum licensing costs in Europe and Asia, is that anyone not migrating to a CDMA "flavor" will simply get run over by lower cost CDMA based service providers. So the prognostication that the whole world is going to a flavor of CDMA is based on very solid facts.
As for the interest by Asian and European providers in WCDMA, I believe it is much more a politically leveraged situation than a technological/ecomonic one (read my previous post to Bill). Dr. J. said in his press release they will be investing wherever they can in CDMA2000 services where they compete with WCDMA providers. That is a very strong statement. It also makes perfect sense since WCDMA is a less spectrally efficient (though more efficient than GSM 3G propositions, which have all been discarded) than CDMA 2000.
In summary, WCDMA is not so much a European standard as it is a European modified Qualcomm standard. These modifications contain some GSM type elements at the expense of spectral efficiency provided by the pure Qualcomm standard, CDMA2000. Qualcomm however, was in a strong enough position to extract the same royalty fee for CDMA transmission applications regardless of "flavor". Future WCDMA operators (if there are very many, and I ultimately doubt it very much that there will), however, can be reasonably sure that they will be competing against providers with a superior mousetrap, CDMA2000 and HDR. |
