Puck,
<< there is a glaring inconsistency that I don't think can easily be glossed over: if the Korean 1XRTT phones are being sold commercially, how can they be test models? >>
They are not exactly test models. These are hansets commercially for sale to the public.
The distinction between "Trial" & "Test" can get a little murky in wireless or any industry using silicon. The engine that I referred to as a "trial platform" not "test" chip (which I think of as being engineering samples or perhaps risk chips) is the QUALCOMM MSM5000 chip which was originally identified on QUALCOMM roadmaps as a "trial" chip, but has shipped in commercial quantity:
Message 15179717
The term "Risk" chip is sometimes used in the silicon industry, and it denotes a chip that gets you to market where the "Risk" is on the (handset in this case) vendor to patch or replace, but the intent is limited but commercial introduction.
It is possible that the initial production of MSM5000's (not engineering samples) was "Risk" and that subsequent shipments were updated and may be functioning reasonably well.
Design of the MSM5000 started well before the IS-2000 standard was accepted by the ITU as an IMT-2000 standard, and so far as I can determine is compliant to the July 1999 TIA IS-2000 standard but not the final standard that was well massaged by OHG.
SKT's "commercial launch" announced on the last day of Q3 2000 (with no handsets or only a handful of the SKY's on hand), and launched 1st day of Q4 2001, is essentially (or was essentially) a "commercial trial" ... in other words handsets commercially available (not as test models) even if miniscule numbers were in retail outlets. Caveat Emptor, so they say.
I suspect that the initial SKY models ... even possibly the initial Samsung model which so far as I know did NOT make it into retail stores by December as promised, may have only functioned acceptably in IS 95-B mode. This possibly indicated by this comment in the article:
"phone makers are passively dealing with the problem by manually switching the service type to that of existing models".
You may recall that I mentioned here some time ago that I saw an early report out of Korea (for which I unfortunately neglected to capture the URL) that the original SKY models were operating at peak rates of 64 kbps initially and theorized this might be the case (but wondered if alternatively that another gating mechanism was in place) ... if in fact the report was credible.
Presumably as the "commercial trial" progressed and debugging took place the models were progressively software upgraded, and if they are still not functioning acceptably will be software upgraded at the appropriate time, or worst case have the ASIC replaced (YUK!). Although the pinout is different MSM5000 to MSM5105
All of this is very similar to what DoCoMo (also "trialing" or "launching") planned for May 31 of this year ... also using a pre-IMT-2000 standard, but they sensibly postponed the "launch" and chose to call it a beta instead. Since it was touted as the worlds first 3G launch it had a tad more visibility than SKT's in Seoul.
First to market advantage is important, although it can whiplash if the early product gets negative press. We have seen this with NEC at DoCoMo and Manx, and MOT at Sonera.
QUALCOMM has been pushing a 1st to market advantage to its hilt, and has been fortunate that there has been little negative feedback out of the "commercial launch/trial" till today's report. That is not to say that there has not been negative feedback. There has been if you scour the Korean press & English translated web sites ... but it has been mild and has not made it out to the big wide world.
One thing I should point out here is that we have the word of a single Korean journalist (Yun, Dae-won) on this subject, and that journalist may have no more credibility than my favorite US journalist, Lynette Luna, who seldom names sources ... unless she is bagging Nokia. <g>
I am ALWAYS a bit leery of what is reported by journalists, and advise others to be leery as well, particularly if a qualified source is not quoted.
The last thing this industry needs right now is more negative publicity surrounding 3G or ersatz 3G. The report may not tell the whole or factual story.
- Eric - |
