Thanks + Cautions and Questions
Don
Profound thanks for sharing the ripe fruit of your hard work and penetrating insights into evolution of the wireless world, essays which span breaking technology and smashing political conflicts. It's not clear to me for what other purpose -- I hope there is one which give you more return on your investment than yours posts earn at SI and IHub -- but we are all in your debt for sharing your work with us.
Some cautions:
Scope - The scope of these papers is daunting, and your wish to compress your analysis into digestible bulletins has led you, I fear, to use terms which are not defined or explained (some technical but some colloquial, such as "value web") as rather critical tendons in your argument. The pressure of brevity on such complex subjects has also led you to an assertive and conclusory style which won't necessarily persuade the sceptical or the uninformed.
Slant - The tone of the papers is academic, as in a paper or analysis for a course or for publication. But the substance is, quite often, a brief as in a legal brief or argument for one party. Some absolutely brilliant analysis and writing has been done in legal briefs which support conclusions which are known and stated at the outset. But such writing is rarely read outside of the context for which it is prepared, an adversary proceeding. Again, I feel, this is a result of the pressure for brevity. You have covered so many subjects and such a complex development cycle.
Also some questions which linger:
1. wCDMA Development - What was the contribution from Japan. NTT DoCoMo and its suppliers e.g. NEC were certainly deeply involved in wCDMA but I never see any explanation of the comparative contributions fromEurope and Japan, the ownership of IPR in Japan, an explanation of how DoCoMo and its suppliers could roll out the technology and sell BTS and MSM equipment without licenses from all the other claimants (or do they have licenses?) and a history of why Japan and Europe worked together this time and why the Japanese went on to rollout without waiting for the standards process to stabilize. All this is important as we wonder what effect the IPR claims and standards non-stability will have on rollout of wCDMA in other parts of the world.
2. GSM Licensing and Royalties. Your work on the IPR licensing process which underlay GSM is outstanding. The Bekkers et al. paper is a wonderful piece of work and you enhance it. Indeed for it seems a decade the Six Musketeers pretty much had the GSM handset market to themselves as royalty process and cost were entry barriers too high to vault. What has happened in the last few years. The Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese are making GSM phones, not alway under their onw mark to be sure, in hug quantity. What royalties are they paying now. They cannot possibly be paying 20+%. Have the Musketeers cut their royalties way back to deflect the political (and possibly legal) offensive from countries outside Europe? I just cannot believe that all the pressure on royalties would be brought to bear on QCOM when their royalties are in the two to seven percent range where tech patents have almost always settled out unless the GSM cabal had brought their cumulative royalties down to the range of past experience in other fields.
3. Tell us more about the evolution of QCOM's 3G. In 1998, QCOM was offering its CDMA standard as a 3X, or 3x1.25 mhz band. The argument was about comparative merit of the QCOM proposal at (paired)3.75 band and the wCDMA (paired)5.0 band. The premise of both sides, as I recall but do not understand, was that every improvement to 3G levels for data transmission would require wider spreading than could be effected in the paired 1.25 band. At that point both camps asserted that 3G could not be launched (in most countries?) in existing cell phone spectrum because the band allocations were not wide enough. Both camps argued for 3G in the 2.1 ghz portion of the spectrum. Then in 1999 HDR, just a chimera in 1998, morphed into DO and EV-DO and 3G in existing spectrum became not only possible but the enormously favored path because carriers would not have to win allocations of new spectrum (and pay for them !!!) and because the migration path from 2G to 1X and then DO was completely compatible. What happened? Was this a head fake by QCOM, where they asserted that new spectrum would be required for 3G sending Euros off on a "If you can spread 3.75 I can spread wider" campaign, and then ducked back to 800/1900 mhz spectrum for their "real" offensive into 3G??
Any wisdom and information would be appreciated. Just give me cites and authorities to read instead of doing new work yourself.
Many thanks
propitious |
