Arun, it seems that Andrew Viterbi has been quietly interested in OFDM for a while. I suppose the outcome will be Flarion's technology combined with QUALCOMM technology in the SpinCo business.
Flarion says they can treat voice as data, but I don't think they can [while retaining the huge efficiencies they claim]. Andrew Viterbi was insistent that the two don't go together and unless I see something convincing to the contrary, I think I'll stick with that.
Engineer, Craig Farrill and others have said that data can tolerate small delays, with packets arriving at odd times then being reassembled in the right order, but can't tolerate errors, so error correction is needed and causes little delays. Voice on the other hand, must go through as it happens and if some doppler muck or warble or data loss gets in the way, then that's just too bad and like the mail, the voice must go through, rain, hail, sleet, snow, or data loss nothwithstanding.
I envisage OFDM, at some stage, becoming the data link for subscriber devices and CDMA the voice link and probably integrated into one, little, low power ASIC, with radioOne doing some good tricks to make them more efficient.
But, CDMA might be so efficient that although OFDM gives more data per spectrum, it isn't that big a deal. A bit like CDMA is much better than GSM, but because all the other costs, such as marketing, dominate so much, CDMA as the subscriber sees it, isn't much cheaper. The great CDMA capacity advantage should translate into subscriber financial advantage. That isn't the case so far.
Mqurice |
