EJ - Is there working W-CDMA today or not? I keep asking this question and no-one seems to have an exact answer.
It's been answered numerous times by means of documented trials. Obviously trials can't take place without working ASICs. Now you might argue that such an ASIC could be emulated by a device the size of a computer. However, Infineon has announced a GSM/GPRS/EDGE/W-CDMA ASIC:
infineon.com
And as we know, Qualcomm's expecting work on a W-CDMA ASIC to be completed by early next year, with Gilder stating that it should be done by the end of this year.
Secondly the whole royalty issue and the GGP or 3GGP group or whatever they call themselves where is the whole issueof Q's royalties on W-CDMA and if these handest are going to be sold then lets see who is going to enter into royalty agreements.
A voluntary patent partnership's been set up to handle the royalty issues with the guidelines being that every "essential" patent held by a given company related to the W-CDMA standard will result in a .1% royalty being paid to its owner. Although most major companies with W-CDMA IPR have chosen to enter into this partnership, Qualcomm's opted to stay out, and so companies looking to manufacture W-CDMA-related products will have to deal with Qualcomm independently, as many of them already have.
Frankly, the antipathy I find among Qualcomm investors towards W-CDMA, much like the antipathy I see among Rambus investors towards DDR, is quite startling to me. Who cares if Qualcomm didn't develop the specifications for the standard as long as their IPR's included, as it is. It's painstakingly obvious to me that W-CDMA's going to be an absolute godsend for the company's bottom line.
Also, for those who will be glad if W-CDMA were to be deployed but are hoping for cdma2000/HDR rollouts, even if one were to assume that somehow, if W-CDMA were to get delayed significantly (nothing's come up to suggest that so far), that carriers would opt for cdma2000 and HDR, it'd take quite a while before they made that shift, and the hit on Qualcomm's bottom line for the time that these carriers stuck with their GSM/PDC networks would more than offset the potentially higher ASIC market share Qualcomm might enjoy with cdma2000/HDR rollouts.
And chapq, regarding Prudential's 3G projections, all I can say is that time and time again, industry projections for markets and technologies that have been popular to catch on have been obscenely low. Check out what overall handset sales projections were in 1996, or what fibre channel industry projections were in early 1998, or for a really good laugh, what internet traffic projections were a few years ago. These guys will always be excessively conservative even when common sense dictates that their numbers should be different; and common sense currently seems to dictate that if 3G rollouts start getting underway in 2001-2002, by mid-late 2003, if most urban areas serviced by a given carrier are covered with 3G base stations, and if the most advanced, most popular handsets offered by these carriers utilize 3G technologies, it's very unlikely that, for these operators, older GSM/PDC handset sales will outnumber 3G handset sales. For a good reference, consider the speed at which certain operators were able to move their handset sales from analog to digital, especially outside of the Americas, where population density has tended to be higher.
Eric |
