Gilder never said that WCDMA won't work. He said that its purpose, as the standard is being written, is to make WCDMA as different from Qualcomm's as possible, while still benefiting from its advantages, so that the Euros and Japanese could protect or grab world leadership in wireless communications.
Gilder also said that the Japanese government, specifically, has been pressuring NTT into developing a 3G standard which would be Japanese. Because of this, Gilder said that NTT has been developing WCDMA since the early 1990s.
This is where it gets a little technical and beyond me. Gilder said that WCDMA theoretically enhances the advantages of CDMA by expands the "chipping rate" by four within its spectrum which is of course wider than the Q's version. According to Gilder, the signal is spread more widely and lower power is used so that the background noise is less. Because more users can share a single channel, "the statistical multiplexing advantages of variable rate vocoding are enhanced." Whatever that means.
Gilder's problem is that at some point, the number of users is too large, screwing things up. Q's studies suggested that the 1.25 MHz spread is the ideal spectrum size. Gilder believes that the current WCDMA proposal is only 6% more efficient than if the Q's version is used. A lot of effort for such little return. Other problems, according to Gilder, include more power use, more complex chips, more silicon area and,perhaps, lower performance.
More complexity is added by the fact that WCDMA adjusts the power level 1600 times per sec. whereas CDMA does it 800 times per sec. He also says something I utterly don't understand, except for ramifications which sound dire to WCDMA's future: "But power control bits, because they cannot be coded for error protection (there is no time to decode them) must be sent at much higher power than the rest of the signal, boosting interference, and sweeping the design well beyond the point of diminishing returns."
According to Gilder, the worst parts of the standard's features are unlikely to survive.
He concludes that WCDMA will have a long pregnancy and a difficult delivery, but he does not unqualifiedly state that it won't work. Neither does Dr. J, whose comments, though less detailed than Gilder's, suggest that he has reached the same conclusion.
I hope I don't get flamed. I'm no techie but I'm still looking for the truth. And a question I haven't seen answered in the current debate is this one:
If it doesn't work, why is the Q designing chipsets for it? |
