General question to the thread,...just learning this wireless stuff and notice that lots of you beat your chest about CDMA and Qualcom stuff (big gorilla that will beat up all it's competition), when Wi-Lan, a little company in Canada has that technology sucking fumes (according to its proponents). Any comments, particularly on the speeds? Is there a chimp here ready to turf out a gorilla,...or are these different tornados?
http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=14357150
Wi-Lan website:
http://www.wi-lan.com/first.html
Russett,
You may be mixing apples and oranges a bit here in your question.
If the world were to switch to the Qualcomm standard(3G and 4G), would this exclude Wi-Lan's technology?
The answer is obviously "yes" If the world were to switch since qcomm is not WIN and the world choosing Qcomm is the premise in your question.
But how likely is it that the entire planet chooses a qcom standard? If you ask the question a bit differently, like "what does win have to compete with wcdma, cdma2000?" you probably get a better investor picture.
Wi-LANs other patent, mc-dsss, is closer to w-cdma, and cdma2000 than w-ofdm is. It is unclear to me if w-cdma or cdma2000 NEEDS the mc-dsss patent to work.
Both w-cdma, and cdma2000 are 2.5g or 3g (depending on how you think of the definitions of x in "Xg"). I don't think their data rates ever get much above 250 kilobits per second on a sustained basis. In comparison wi-lans w-ofdm has been on the market at 30 megabits per second for quite awhile now, and 54 is available and 90 mbps is announced. w-ofdm is basically at least 100 times faster than w-cdma or cdma2000 on a sustained basis.
For 4G technology, there is only one enabler out there so far that I know of and that is WIN's w-ofdm. That is why 4GNT ( 4gnt.com ) has said they will buy 1.x billion U$ worth of wi-lan product over the next 4-5 years or so. However 4gnt is a startup so it carries some risk, and most win investors are awaiting proof of 4gnt's financial backers viability before assuming these forecast sales are real.
Your question also skirts the whole GSM issue (a european standard - for the most part that is 3G oriented).
The other thing you need to think about is imagine a bunch of cell towers and cars with drivers in them using w-cdma or cdma2000. What wireless technology can connect the tower with a 100 simultaneous calls with another tower 5- 15 miles away so that the local telco switch can redirect to the land line? This type of WAN application is probably where w-ofdm will shine in the near term. This is another way of saying the cdma2000 / wcdma debate doesn't matter. Both result in the same problem for telco's : 100 concurrent calls at 3kbps in aggregate needing up to 30 mbps connectivity to tie to the main phone network. Both result in demand for something like w-ofdm fixed wireless point to point.
...rr |
