Gidday from the deep south Andrew. Thanks for all your soothsaying on cyberphones. It has been a great help.
A couple of questions.
1.....Do you think Motorola will have to pay a royalty for W-CDMA handsets or do they slip under the wire with their pre-1995 deal at 0% royalty?
<What the heck? Message 17910878
<<Fok said Hutchison would sell 3G handsets for roughly HK$15,000 ($1,923) in Hong Kong, where it is the dominant 2G operator, and less than half of that in the United Kingdom, where the phones will be sold near cost.>>
Well, this gets very, very interesting. NEC and Motorola as handset makers. NEC is a licensee and so is Motorola, but Motorola has a no-royalty licence for pre-1995 QUALCOMM patents [I think that's the deal].
$900 at 5% royalty = $45, which is a pretty good profit. QUALCOMM did say they were going to establish an upper limit for royalties, but I haven't seen what the upper limit is [or can't recall it].
Now, suppose QUALCOMM becomes the champion producer of W-CDMA ASICs for handsets, that'll be an added bonus. QUALCOMM has a pretty good technology profile including gpsOne, radioOne and BREW which might make their technology most attractive.
No wonder the main thing Irwin Jacobs worried about with W-CDMA was it being delayed.
I wonder if Motorola has to pay royalties on W-CDMA for the Hutchison cyberphones.>
2.....Li Ka Ching'$ idea seems to be to bulldoze VW-40 into Europe with D'oh!CoMo's financial and technological backing, while picking up the spectrum and assets of the desolate European operators at bargain prices.
He did okay nabbing Global Crossing's assets at an even lower price than he originally offered creditors. Hutchison Whampoa is shaping up to replace Vodafone as the major global cyberphone operator.
Will he succeed or what the heck is going on? I don't see how he can build out in Euro 2GHz, at huge prices, what can be done in 900 MHz with GSM1x at a third the cost, unless he can get the Eurocrats to protect his 2GHz investments from competition in 900MHz.
Maybe he is a 21st century cyberspace Napoleon about to meet his Waterloo, which is where QUALCOMM/Samsung should build a demonstration GSM1x network to show what can be done in existing spectrum for GSM operators.
He is certainly gung ho about W-CDMA. The results in Japan don't support him, technologically, even without the cost penalty of 2GHz spectrum instead of 900MHz. He has got a big reputation to lose, [or loose].
Mqurice
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