Mike,
I contacted Bill Frezza and asked him about the responses he made on the Air Touch conference call and sent him your post He e-mailed me this response on Air Touch.
Jim
James,
No, I haven't disappeared. I was, in fact, on the Airtouch conference call and the questions I asked were accurately reported. Voice quality on the Qualcomm QCP-800 phone operating at 13 Kbps is, in truth, quite good. Is it better than GSM? In my opinion, it's a wash. Both sides will produce studies showing that their vocoder is preferred by consumers. The Bell Atlantic CDMA system does have a significant problem with vocoder delay which is very annoying if you are talking with someone who never learned speakerphone etiquette. I have no idea how the market is going to react to this. When I asked Lee Cox about the vocoder delay problem, he waved it off.
More importantly, I believe that all of my statements about CDMA capacity have now been vindicated. Bell Atlantic is experiencing a 6x capacity gain over AMPS. Airtouch is claiming 6x - 10x in LA and you can use your own judgement as to which end of this range they are actually achieving. Note that this is at 8 Kbps. It seems that Airtouch has finally admitted that it has to abandon 8 Kbps vocoders, which means the capacity gains will be reduced proportionately, down to 3.5x - 6x, which is PRECISELY what I said in my column last spring. Nobody, nowhere is getting 10x-20x AMPS and nobody ever will. But hey, the system sales have already been made, so this bogus claim can now be quietly dropped. Same with the so-called coverage advantages of CDMA, which are absolutely nonexistent. The only reason Bell
Atlantic has gotten CDMA to almost work in Trenton is that they have
upgraded each and every AMPS cellsite. And only a fool still believes that CDMA systems are easier to engineer, install, and power balance than CDMA systems. The facts are in on this one.
Notwithstanding Airtouch's brilliant ambush PR initiative in San Diego, it is becoming clear that CDMA has been a total failure at 800 MHz. Airtouch's "controlled migration" plan is a scam - an excuse to shield these products from the public for as long as possible. All that effort to migrate 15% of their traffic to digital, which probably equates to less than 3% of their customers? Give me a break. Airtouch has been "commercial" in LA since May and all they have is a few hundred customers? That represents a couple of hours worth of new activations on APC's TDMA system in Washington DC. US West has gone invisible in Seattle. Bell Atlantic will still not commit to
launching commercial service in 1996, notwithstanding the outright lies in Qualcomm's press releases claiming that the system is already in commercial operation. Call failure rates are too high, dropped calls remain a problem, and digital to analog handoff is still not working right. (Note that Airtouch isn't even trying to make d/a handoffs work in San Diego.) Not only that, but positioning digital as a higher-cost premium service is going to be a disaster when all of the new PCS operators are coming to market offering digital at a discount! It's all over at 800 MHz except for the recriminations. My prediction is you will see the supply side of the industry walk away from 800 MHz as vendors put all their efforts into trying to make CDMA work for PCS up at 1900.
As for the many promised advantages of CDMA, when the dust settles there is going to be one and only one differential benefit left standing, and that is battery life. (I really am getting 5 hours of talk time on my QCP-800.)Granted, this is important to heavy users. But is it worth the inordinate delay, the loss of market share to TDMA operators, and the significantly higher costs of CDMA infrastructure? Not to mention the one thing that no one knows yet - will these systems be stable under heavy load?
As for the CDMA Forum on my web site, the whole thing is on hold as CMP (my publisher) has decided to terminate the Techweb Gurus experiment. I am in the process of setting up a new web site under the auspices of Network Computing magazine, where I hope to continue the CDMA dialogue, but these things take time.
Feel free to circulate or repost this note in any discussion forums on this subject.
Regards,
Bill Frezza
frezza@interramp.com
215-321-0929 |
