I have been lurking and watching the thread from time to time while I
pursue other matters full time, but the level of FUD has reached a new
perspective and I felt it was time to post some HISTORY for the thread.
I will not post any more after this for awhile, but I felt that a
perspective was needed here which alot of you may never have seen
before.
In 1991, we performed a system demo of CDMA using 200 phones and 5 base
stations for about 500 industry experts in San Diego. I had worked on
this project for almost 18 months prior to this and was part of the
team which rolled this out. We had little or no attention up to that
point and were left to prove what we had said. The demo was a total
success and worked just as advertised and was largely the same system
that we have today as IS-95a. Still we got little press from this event
until Dec 7, 1991. At that time, for you historians, you may remember
that the TDMA standard was all the rage and everyone, including the
europeans were all on board for that to become the next North American
Standard. They had fought a long battle among themselves and had just
voted on the TDMA standard, but had as of then not implemented anything
in a real overall field system. On Dec 7th, there was a CTIA meeting and
Dr Jacobs went there and presented the results of the system trials. At
the end of the presentation, he said "We now have the only fully tested
and fully field trial implemented digital cellular system in the United
States. We also have production ready chipsets to supply the industry".
What happened after that was history which any one of you can
go find on the web archives. Europe and the TDMA crowd held
emergency meetings, allocated funds, and started a PR campaign like
Qualcomm had never seen. The amount of FUD that came about between 1992
and 1994 was so tremendous that at times they even made comments that
the basic Physics of the system could never work. The TDMA (and analog cellular) crowd
petitioned the CTIA that said that Qualcomm could not sell anything
until they had a standard, which set Qualcomm back 1 year in the
rollout......etc. The point was that Irwin had embarrassed them by
showing that their work was all talk and no product and that Qualcomm
had a working system and was ready to produce it in commercial versions
when carriers wanted it. The TDMA crowd rushed their system to market,
published article after article on how Qualcomm was wrong, how their
stuff would never work, how they could not own the technology, how they
would never catch up, etc. By 1995, the TDMA phones had gone through
their peak sales, had been introduced into the market with so many bugs
that they hardly worked on the systems, and had made a terrible mess of
the whole thing. Qualcomm and Dr. J had largely ignored them all and
gone on about just delivering what we had promised. A working system
with excellent voice quality and excellent coverage. He did not answer
the press which criticized him daily and wrote articles which even
personally attacked him as a liar ("Jacob's Patter", WSJ circa 1994).
All he did was PERFORM.
The point of this is that when he showed the TDMA cabal ( GSM is part of
that) that they were not getting the job done, they went way out of
their way to produce volumes of FUD in every way possible.
Next comes 1997 and China. In order to win over there, Qualcomm started
making claims that they would be able to back up, but the GSM people had
started getting an idea that the Chinese were more than a little pissed
that they had no local manufacturing content and that the GSM crowd had
locked them out. The trick here, and why Qualcomm has never really had a
phone is that you must submit your phone to ETSI in order to get the GSM
stack "approved" and somehow both Qualcomm and Chinese mfgs could never
quite seem to get it right.
So the Chinese dictated to the GSM crowd that they wanted to go with
CDMA, which they felt after talking with Q that they had a very good
chance to get a lions share of the local mfg market. Qualcomm would help
them get certified, and sell them compliant hardware and software. This
forced the GSM crowd to make that famous change to "our next generation
will be CDMA based". A giant concession for the GSM crowd to make
publicly. But leading up December of 1998, when the Chinese government
announced directly that "the next system in China must be CDMA based",
we saw a tremendous amount of FUD being generated by Ericson and others
trying to beat down Qualcomm once again. What was really happening was
that ERICY was secretly negotiating for a CDMA lic and to buy the
infrastructure division of Qualcomm to secure a place in that Chinese
rollout. We all saw what really happened in 1999. Again, Qualcomm and
Dr. J continued on a single path. Deliver what they said they would,
perform like they said they would, and secure positions in world markets
like they said they would.
Now we have the present. Qualcomm goes to the GSM conference and
presents FACTS. It takes so many months to roll out and test a system.
It takes so many months to get a standard approved. It takes so many
months to get a handset to world class sizes and performance. He was simply
restating the FACTS that the GSM crowd had made to him MANY MANY times
before over the years. In looking
at announcements and real devices out there, he sees no way that the
WCDMA crowd can meet the deadlines they have announced. He also
presented that the carriers of all technologies need to be aware that
they must meet revenues or they will be forced to compete with others
who have better economics. Now we see the same resurgence of FUD coming
out every day. The GSM crowd is launching an attack to try to throw a
cloud over the idea that WCDMA may be late to get their stuff out to
market or that they really are just launching a test system this year and won't have real installed working revenue bearing systems for 2-3 years.
The Head of NTT was embarrassed and had to retrace steps, the head of
NOK was embarrassed and had to figure out a good story to tell, the head
of AT&T is trying to figure out a good story to tell. Many of the GSM
carriers are now asking "Why did I spend xxx billions of dollars (euros)
to buy this license now if I can't use it for 3 more years?", or more
importantly "how will I carry the debt load and for how long until this
is all worked out?" So, in keeping with their true nature, they are
using the stall, FUD, defame tactics while Dr. J is using the same ones
he has used over time. Keep his head down, push his engineers to perform
well, his managers to execute well, and just do what he said he would.
He has not warned about losing the market as has NOK, he hasn't warned
that chip sales are down, he has not warned about anything, yet anyone
else who is in a DIFFERENT position in the market is being used to
construe that it must mean that Qualcomm will fall from the sky like a
flaming star. OF course NOK is warning because they have taken this route of adversary
and stall, delay rollout so that they can milk every last dollar out of GSM, and not address the real issue that they have not been able to perform and live up to claims that they have made in CDMA for more than 8 years now.
I just wonder how many times you all are going to ignore history and let
them take your stock? (this includes the brain trusts at places like
CSFB, Charles Schwab, Whit Soundview, and others.). How many times have
they tried to tell you that CDMA doesn't work, it doesn't sell, it
doesn't meet industry requirements, it is not 3G, etc.....
(and if you don't like my spelling and typos....... ffo ssip) |
