John, I'm enjoying following the debates and I've got to give you points on debating quality.
I also like the point about gigabits per hour per cubic kilometre. That's a succinct way of explaining the desire of people for mobile cyberspace and the pressure on spectrum.
I made it per hour because people don't want cyberspace on a per second basis - that's what the greedy service providers try to extract from them. They want to spend some time cerfing cyberspace at a low cost.
On the other hand, per second is vital because they don't want to spend more than their reaction time waiting for data to trundle down a narrow pipeline. As you say, "gigabits", not the commonly offered "kilobytes", is the quantity wanted; and now.
Being a shareholder in both RoamAD Message 18335694 and QUALCOMM shows I've decided they both have a big role to play.
QUALCOMM has got the low density areas covered, which WiFi can't do. WiFi can provide the petabits per hour per cubic kilometre in Ginza, on the Yamanote line, in London on Oxford Street, around New York, Hong Kong and Mumbai. But in Eketahuna, the cockies and Jafas are too far apart to be reached by WiFi. They need CDMA [or Flarion].
People will have both built into their devices. The extra cost of WiFi in a CDMA/GSM/GPRS/W-CDMA/ multimode, multiband device will be low. So the utility of a device will be greatly enhanced by having WiFi as well as CDMA. So QUALCOMM will sell a lot more ASICs when WiFi is prolific than if it didn't exist. WiFi is good for QUALCOMM, not bad.
People want a consumer surplus. The bigger the better. They couldn't get it with Globalstar's marketing methods and technology and it's not surprising Globalstar failed.
If Globalstar had been able to offer a single device with low cost cyberspace access and CDMA service, without a penalty in battery life, or size, or associated features, they would have had a winner. But they didn't even sell their minutes cheaply enough to attract users in sufficient number.
QUALCOMM can easily clip WiFi into their devices [engineers groan at the use of the word 'easy' - which really means after great effort by some really smart people who have studied for years and who are paid a lot of money and stock options and it'll only take 2 or 3 years and the unit cost to consumers will be very low].
With WiFi on board, subscribers can step around the likes of Telecom New Zealand and their ridiculously overpriced data charges when in the gigabits per hour, per cubic kilometre, WiFi zone. When out in the wop-wops [like Eketahuna], they'll download their email using Telecom but save the heavy duty gigabyting for later, so they'll still want the low cost ASIC on board to enable complete coverage.
Subscribers will also want Globalstar so they can get coverage everywhere, including on the Space Shuttle. That'll come when the next constellations are built and newer devices created, using radioOne etc. So they'll have Globalstar for mid Pacific Ocean or at the North Pole [neither of which are available now, but would be with a 10,000 km orbit fill in constellation], CDMA via terrestrial services for Eketahuna and WiFi by RoamAD for riding the Yamanote line and in Akihabara where there are more internerd geeks per cubic kilometre than anywhere on earth akiba.or.jp
For $20 extra, most people would like to have wide, wider and widest coverage and the more the coverage, the greater the utility of the device. If you have paid for a battery, colour screen, case, and are carting it around, you might as well hotwire the GSM/WiFi/GPRS/Globalstar options too for a small extra fee.
Life restricted to WiFi hotzones would be too narrow for nearly everyone.
The territorial claims of WiFi and CDMA will be based on the cost of base station equipment and how small it can be made.
Big, civil engineering, CDMA base stations and towers requiring town planning are expensive and contaminate cubic kilometres of spectrum [which is desirable in Eketahuna but not Ginza]. It's cheaper to cover Eketahuna with a big brutal base station than swarms of little WiFi pops. One sheep and her shepherd don't need a lot of spectrum.
Cute, cheap, inconspicuous, low-powered little WiFi pops which can be scattered like confetti downtown give better cyberservice than bulk CDMA.
Somewhere in the suburbs, or on the fringe of towns, WiFi will be too puny and too expensive. The interface will move as technology moves and demand builds.
QUALCOMM is well-placed to be the main supplier of the integrated circuitry and software and things like gpsOne, radioOne, BREW and other stuff which people want. Just as they are clipping on [again, apologies to engineers] GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth, etc, they can clip on WiFi.
WiFi will give QUALCOMM a turbo-boost by increasing the consumer surplus subscribers enjoy from their cyberphone devices.
<It's money, not love. No place for emotion Jim >
The old saw about keeping emotions out of investing is not just silly, it's dangerous. People cannot be separated from their emotions. They might think they are being rational and unemotional when things are going well and a purchasing decision is made, but when things turn to mush and they've lost all their money, most people feel some emotional variations. Similarly, irrational exuberance is great fun.
But on an even more basic level, I think love is what investment is about. Money is just a handy measuring stick to decide who own what. Irwin Jacobs isn't investing his efforts and money to get more money. It's love. It's fun. It's emotion. Same for $ill Gates. There is a contaminating and competing emotion, power, but in modern economies love is more powerful.
Humans have increasingly operated on a voluntary exchange of value and love with increasingly broad links around the world, with less genetic and tribal territoriality and less wealth by power and conquest, though they are still strong components of all business. I get a kick out of Ericsson and Motorola [who tried skooshing QUALCOMM] having much lower market caps than QUALCOMM and am watching with pleasure as Nokia is gradually being caught. I have my sights on Microsoft and Intel and IBM.
Mqurice
PS: I also changed your units from miles to kilometres because the USA is one of the few places still in the stone age. SI units are much nicer to use. Also, I suspect we'll be wanting petabits rather than gigabits |
