It`s ironic that Nokia`s failure in CDMA,now spun as a failure of CDMA (that wasn`t their position 4 months ago),was announced on the same day SK Telecom decided to invest $1 bil in China Unicom`s CDMA business. KDDI surely has performed beautifully head-to-head with DoCoMo, Korea remains staunchly CDMA, despite forced forays into WCDMA/HSDPA/WiBRO by the Korean government, and Verizon and Sprint can`t get their DORevA CSM`s fast enough. I doubt Nokia intends to forgo the U.S. CDMA market, and peddle their brand at only T-Mobile and Cingular. All they`ve done is stop bleeding R&D dollars to avoid using Qualcomm chipsets, a strategy that never had considered their shareholders best interests.If they are to sell any Nokia phones to Verizon, Sprint, Alltel, or Cricket, China Unicom,or anywhere in the world, whether manufactured by Pantech or anyone else, they must have a license from Qualcomm.
As for their "patent counting" approach to WCDMA IPR, the number of patents, as opposed to their quality, difficulty,sophistication, and complexity, has never been the way IPR has been valued, witness the current agreement between QCOM/NOK, and QCOM/all others.There is a commercial course of conduct, established by arms length negotiations aided by enlightened engineers and attorneys, that led to the present reality. It`s understandable that Nokia would like to change the rules of the game, because it can`t win on the merits. |
