Tom, the whole NextWave fiasco would have been avoided if Q! had charged the royalties they should have done = 100% of the wholesale price of subscriber devices. Then the spectrum bids would have been lower and slavering greedies would not be fighting like crazy to get a piece of the action.
I commented at the time that NextWave would look silly if they ended up paying MORE for the spectrum than they bid if it went back to auction. At the time, it was obvious that the spectrum was not too expensive. Now that has been proven.
Now it's a matter of property rights and the USA legal system is going to punish either the useless FCC and Congress for setting really stupid auction rules then delaying the issue of the licences, or they'll punish NextWave for not just going ahead and paying the money.
What a shambles. And still the USA has their stupid system where the person receiving a call pays the bill! Also, licences are not issued for national coverage, being sold instead for rinky-dink little areas which means companies then have to do deals later via roaming, mergers or other Mickey Mouse means to offer subscribers national coverage. No wonder the useless Europeans with their absurd State Diktat rules are doing better than the USA in cellphones.
The USA will come from behind now that CDMA has threaded its way through the morass and costs are getting so low that somebody calling isn't such a big deal. People won't have to leave their cellphones turned off to avoid paying for incoming calls.
Mqurice
PS: For the mathematically challenged, if a subscriber device had a wholesale price of $100, then Q! would be paid $100 and the device would change hands for $200. A WWeb device using the swanky new MSM3300, at $500, would earn Q! $500 and the gadget would sell for $1000.
The service provider would give the gadget away for $1 and a 2 year contract, then charge 5c a megabyte [or some such]. Okay, maybe 10c. Since HDR can do 10 megabits per second [in the new, improved version], that's a pretty good profit! Maybe too expensive. Anyway, the spectrum would then be cheaper because the subscriber would be feeling a little softened up at these seriously high prices, so would not be so greedy for bits, which are in short supply [as shown by the high-priced auctions].
BlueKite would be a good seller since it will cut the number of bits somebody needs to do a WWeb job [by a factor of 8].
So will PureVoice.
And other bit-saving ideas, like Metawave, Bluetooth, AirFiber, Wi-Lan's OFDM, MonoCycles [Time Domain], Superconducting filters. |
