Speaking of Bill Frezza, thanks for dragging the old dead horse out for another ritual flogging.
As you point out, it's time for him to eat his article due to QUALCOMM, namely the illustrious Dr Irwin Jacobs, being correct way back in 1990 [and earlier when he had obviously done the calculations] when he discussed the possible capacity advantage of CDMA over analogue cellphone technology.
Bear in mind that Dr J was making those capacity estimates at a time when the technology was barely in the cradle and predicting adult performance by looking in a bassinet is dodgy at best - many is the parent who's early dreams of their family name being raised to the heights have been dashed in failure or even infamy as their wayward offspring go off the rails.
It's akin to Albert Einstein messing around with the gravitational constant when the world was Euclidean, Keplerian, Newtonian and concrete. He was giving a best estimate from the depths of the dark ages. Being picky that he hadn't immediately come up with the Star Trek hyperdrive, complete with quantum tunnelling, is unreasonable.
In fact, said capacity estimates have turned out to be correct. Take that Frezza!! And that!!! And that!!!
Allen Salmasi was also correct to bid $4 billion for C-block spectrum, contrary to naysayers at the time, who you might recall did NOT include your humble sage. So it has come to pass that the price was a bargain. Which means the financial backers blew it by not paying for the spectrum outright and having the full $16 bn rights to it, instead of being hacked around for a decade by the legal system and FCC, losing most of that value. But the bids were not too high. So take that Frezza! And that!!
<Bidding up the price of PCS spectrum beyond all reasonable bounds--paying a whopping $4.7 billion for frequency rights that would allow it to deploy a nationwide footprint--NextWave boasted it would undercut all competition by selling only bulk airtime to resellers like MCI, thereby incurring no marketing, sales and customer support expenses. Salmasi certainly fulfilled his mission of keeping spectrum out of the hands of potential TDMA operators, but the hangover from this "irrational exuberance" is going to be a doozy. Nothing will turn PCS into a price-driven commodity faster than this "minutes of use" factory, assuming NextWave actually completes its financing and builds a network. I >
I would love to see a price-driven commodity for minutes, and that would have been great for USA subscribers who have been laggards in the wireless world. That would have propelled CDMA to hyerspeed as capacity became the issue as service providers squeezed every last minute from the available spectrum. You fool Frezza!! Take that!! One of these days, we will see a price war [we are gradually seeing it, but it's very gradual].
Mqurice
PS: I don't think the Einstein/Jacobs comparison is too far off the mark. |
