Jim; I'm not sure which half-dozen stories you are alluding to but:<<Which one of a half-dozen contradictory stories is the truth?>>
I do believe it is possible to understand why statements by various wireless industry leaders are so confusing. Look to the motives.
Remember that GSM is an amalgam of wireless techniques which existed in Europe prior to the recognition that standardizing those variations would create a more usable telephone system for everyone. After much work, most everyone on the continent agreed to certain methodologies and the standard was successful enough that those who did not agree, still were forced to adapt.
The US and western hemisphere had a large enough market that it chose and could afford to snub the GSM standard. I believe AT&T with its ideas for TDMA and QCOM with its "better way" were allied at that point about 1990. Thus the US did not require carriers to adhere to any one standard for wireless. Probably AT&T would have liked to have had their system endorsed by the FCC or some other standards setting body, but Irwin Jacobs effectively lobbied against that by pointing out the relative advantages a still non existent CDMA could offer. For example, he was quoted in the press as saying at one point that a CDMA system could probably provide up to 40 times the capacity of analog systems--a claim which has been brought up time and again over the last ten years as an example of his willingness to exaggerate for his own purposes. Of course, now that statement is becoming very close to true in practice.
The part which makes so many conflicting claims clear requires an understanding of what happened in Europe. GSM turned out to be a blockbuster and many companies who made the right choices and immediately jumped on the bandwagon achieved huge success. Nokia is the most obvious of those, but clearly Alcatel, Siemens, Ericsson and numerous operators all benefited. And once the infrastructure is in place, the money has been spent to develop a fine GSM capability, the benefiting companies certainly have no desire to see their standard overturned.
That's not to say they weren't working on CDMA as Ericsson claimed for such a long time. But the fact that QCOM successfully patented several of the essential techniques necessary to make CDMA work meant that a revolution to a new and admittedly superior standard would open the game to many new companies and certainly would damage the profitability of said Nokia, and probably to a lesser extent the other more diversified providers. The operators would have to incur large expenses to change to CDMA instead of raking in large profits on the successful GSM standard.
So who would want to upset the apple cart? There were few companies which would outright lie about the potential for GSM vs CDMA and one can find numerous examples of individuals who commented on CDMA's huge promise, often only criticizing the practical application or, more often , the fact that CDMA only had 15% of the worlds subscribers which would make development work on the technology too expensive. AT&T with its own form of TDMA certainly did not want to do anything to encourage CDMA which would force them also to spend large amounts on redesign. The only companies which could speak out were Verizon, Sprint, BCE, SK Telecom and such who were not important members of a standards setting body. And of course QCOM was trying to affect the decisions, but is certainly not encouraged to effectively participate in GPP for example, where they by nature would be trying to overturn the golden goose. So GPP-2 was formed, the CDG attempts to promulgate its own propaganda, and you get randam quotes by people like Oliver Valente of Sprint who I used as a source on the LMT. (There was another quote by a careful poster this morning on the QCOM moderated thread to the effect that he said CDMA2000 is 3 1/2 times as spectrum efficient as W-CDMA, by the way).
Since his bad experience with the comparison of analog and CDMA of 10 years ago, I have listened carefully to everything I can lay my hands on coming out of Irwin Jacobs mouth. I've heard hyperbole from various members of the CDG, from Mr. Valente (I'm still not sure if he really knows all that much or if he just speaks without care), from various other proponents of CDMA, but never from Dr. Jacobs.
It's not that anyone within the GSM camp is a liar necessarily. It's just that, if I were in Nokia's shoes and someone denigrated the possibility that CDMA could not become the dominant standard, my heart would give a little cheer. And I would adopt the strategy which has been adopted by all the individual companies making such wonderful profits on GSM. To wit: work like heck on developing ones own CDMA capability in private, tout GSM as the successful standard it is in public, don't contradict downright serendipidous if ridiculous statements denigrating QCOM's CDMA but encourage any statements which sound like my W-CDMA has an advantage. Then tweak GSM as far as it can be tweaked pointing it out as a successful counter to what the CDMA forces are doing. Unfortunately, the hyperbole got a little out of hand in that case, and Mr. Ollila was forced to step up to point out that the actual rollouts wouldn't perform quite as well as some spokesmen had been suggesting.
To me what is happening all makes perfect sense in light of the history I've tried to outline above. Who does one believe? I would stick to a few individuals rather than the hordes of spokesmen who are paid to encourage one position or another, some of whom are either mistaken or perhaps more willing to distort the truth than others. Forget the analysts--all they do is throw a whole new agenda into the pot. And forget the writers of articles about wireless as they have too little time to really research their exciting breakthrough stories.
Lance |
