Maurice: You are quite right, some operators wished that 3G had never been invented and guess what, the 3G vision even had nothing to do with Qualcomm. Of course squeezing he last out of your equipment extends ROI and there is nothing new in that. As a business you need to grow and of course to do that you want more customers (finite) and/or new services (infinite). GSM will still dominate for the next 5 years.
I am not naive to think that cdma will never happen nor am I one like the ex-BT head of technology or an analyst at Nomura who have both come out and said something along the lines of '3G aint going to happen'.
But then I am not one that says Qcom's vision is going to happen as I seem to remember some posted a year or two back (as we now witness it clearly hasn't).
I have previously said that Qualcomm were one of the most disliked companies in the telecom business...and that still holds true.
I have stated that WCDMA will dominate and that is still the most likely (timescales may have changed due to unforeseen economic circumstances).
I do live in the real world and I advise telecom companies that work in it. Dreams are fine, such as Globalstar, with some dreams becoming reality. However, a dose of realism every now and then does a power of good.
Honestly, I wish the dream of ubiquitous 3G worldwide does come true. We've seen visions in the movies of the future, but getting there is never straight forward. Just look at the history of mobile telephony from disparate analogue systems, with only one standard that I know about that allowed 'roaming', through to the current digital era. GSM provided the best promise of a harmonised world and look what happened. Not only 3 or 4 competing technologies on top of which there are 4 to 6 different spectrum used. Have we not learnt? Seems not, history has a habit of repeating itself...
M
PS My football side just lost its very successful manager and I am not happy! |
