Raymond:
TDMA-based GSM is a good network architecture saddled with a less than ideal air-interface, hence Vodaphone's endeavor to overlay CDMA. I don't recall suggesting that IS-41 was architecturally superior to GSM, the standards evolved under very different political circumstances and were designed to accommodate differing objectives. Both have achieved a substantial installed base, and both will need to be evolved forward. I was suggesting that a greenfield standard could prove more productive than porting either legacy system although the economics could be questionable.
QC's IPR should be protected for seventeen years from patent issuance. I would submit, for example, that QC's power control IPR is fundamental to mobile CDMA and therefore fundamental to W-CDMA. Simply put, the value of the IPR should be more or less equivalent to the cost and/or ability of a competitor to design around it. Setting political consequences aside, this is the threshold against which QC should price its technology.
I absolutely quarrel with your claim that W-CDMA is somehow a superior alternative "because it will not be owned by any company". Rubbish. Ericsson's strategy is clearly an attempt to carve out a differential market position where it, rather than QC, can dominate. W-CDMA is nothing more than Ericsson's attempt to recoup the ground it lost when it was pontificating about CDMA's inadequacy.
The "big licensing fees" that you allude to are a chimera. QC didn't "hit the lottery" and find its IPR under a rock. Rather, its management team assembled, and funded, an extraordinary R&D effort that solved problems that other companies had concluded could not be resolved. The reward for the costs incurred and the risks undertaken, is a valuable and novel patent portfolio. Other companies could have invested the dollars and tried to solve these problems. However, QC's licensees have concluded that it would either be cost or time prohibitive to find alternative solutions to QC's IPR--so the royalties paid are nothing more than the price of accelerated time-to-market coupled with the elimination of R&D expense and risk.
Your perspective would seem to suggest that once something is invented and commercialized, the inventor should no longer be rewarded for his effort, insight and technical accomplishment. Sorry, I don't think so. Ericsson could have chosen to develop CDMA over TDMA-based technologies; it didn't. Rather, it is harvesting its GSM franchise for all it's worth while trying to stymie the competitive threat of a superior technology through aggressive marketing and a bureaucratic standards process. It may be smart business, but please don't ask me to applaud the ethical framework.
Raymond, please don't resign from the debate. Although we may differ, your questions and perspective are valuable.
Best Regards,
Gregg |
