Qveau,
unfortunately I have not the faintest idea about OFDM.
Technology, imho, is a field much larger than law AND medicine taken together. My experience is in a very specific area of IT and therefore totally irrelevant to wireless.
For your amusement, in my area of IT there were once 3 generations of a certain technology, which had nothing to do with wireless. The first generation made good money for the producers, the second generation made enormous money for certain surviving producers and therefore the VCs invested lots of money into the third generation (note, it was mostly the VCs who invested the money, not the inventors). I personally thought, too, that a lot of money would be made with the third generation of this technology.
To make a long story short - initial customer interest was overwhelmingly large and final revenue extremely small. All players either went broke or had to change their business plans to focus on a different technology.
So, if I already misjudged a technology that supposedly was squarely in my circle of competence, how could I opine on OFDM?
I drew the following lesson from this (but some people on SI seem to disagree): It is not relevant what technological features are superior, but whether these features permit either new profitable "killer" applications or to take over existing applications with large and profitable revenue streams. This, however, does not, imho, depend on the features of the technology, ALONE, but on many other factors, including market positions of competitors, regulatory environment, changes in market dynamics and other. Technology IS an important piece of that puzzle, but it is just ONE of the important pieces, imho, and with rare exceptions, NOT the decisive one.
BTW: If you want an example in wireless just look at cellular in the US (so far mainly TDMA and CDMA based) and in Europe (nearly exclusively GSM based). Forget the future (we don't have financial reports for the future), look at the past: Have the economic and financial results of the carriers so far been very different dependent on which technology they have used? Or have other factors (marketing, price of spectrum, etc.) been more important?
Regards
Sam |
