Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM)

QCOM 173.20

-3.3%

Nov 6 3:59 PM EST

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To: Quincy who wrote (129165)	5/23/2003 1:06:56 AM
From: Stock Farmer	Read Replies (1) of 152472

You seem to have an almost unique vision of the demand for portable computing devices and its ability to cover the staggering cost of deploying continuous hotspot service. No actually. I have a very strong view that nearly everybody (ok, everybody who can afford it) will be carrying a portable electronic broadband device of some kind or another. Maybe more than one. And the chattering that these things will do will be incredible. I am taking that as my first axiom. Like many people on this board. Apparently many haven't figured out the effective radius needed to deliver this kind of broadband wireless to a significant fraction of the population at any sort of urban density. You end up with hotspots. Or congestion. Either they are CDMA hotspots or they are OFDM hotspots, doesn't matter. Hotspots or hotspots. Take your pick. It's not a question of where we are going, it's how we get there from here. So far, the performance of packet oriented data optimized WiFi (OFDM) hotspots beats the performance of channel oriented voice optimized cellular (CDMA) hotspots. And since bandwidth is a performance game, OFDM hotspots have a head start over CDMA hotspots. WiFi is designed for the job, 3G in its various flavors is a kludge based on what already exists. And while it is possible to make kludges even better by adding yet more kludges, sooner or later the whole thing comes unraveled. Kind of like EDGE, right? There seems to be a bias on the thread that having ubiquitously available broadband everywhere is some game-over kind of killer advantage. Sustainable enough that a kludge upon kludge upon kludge will win out in the long run over technologies designed for the purpose. I'm personally not sure about that. The tradeoff is this: mediocre performance everywhere, or superior performance, not everywhere. The gamble is this: that the "not everywhere" in which superior service is available is large enough to attract critical mass adoption necessary to sustain business through the inevitable technological improvements which will increase the "not everywhere" that such a service is available. And that "3G" performance will not improve to erode the advantage of "WiFi" performance as fast as WiFi coverage area will increase to reduce the advantage of 3G ubiquity. This argument is not entirely without merit. John

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