Dear Tero,
Aren't you that fickle fellow that works for Ericcson that was
chased off this thread a few months ago for regurgitating the same old
warmed up, worn out, leftover garbage from days past? As a representative of Ericcson it would be nice if in future posts you would be so kind as to disclosing your Nordic affiliations before
singing yesterday's old GSM siren song. Speaking of GSM, how is it
that we never hear about 3rd generation GSM. If GSM truly is God's
gift to the wireless world, why is it then that our Nordic friends
are feverishly working to develop some form of wide-band direct
sequence spread spectrum technology - so called W-CDMA, and preferably
one that uses as little of Qualcomm's IPR as possible? Could it be that GSM has finally reached the end of its road and that it can no longer be tweaked to achieve improved capacity and performance characteristics? Your description of Nokia as an industry juggernaut
with a massive production base that is therefore impossible to compete
with requires some perspective. As recently as late last year Nokia
was the world's largest handset producer with production volume of some 1.5 million per month produced through 5 different production
facilities and spread out over 5 different technology platforms: GSM,
TDMA, PHS, CDMA, and Analog.Qualcomm by contrast,the company you say
has no production experience, has current production volumes that will soon exceed 700,000 per month. Not bad for a company that is only twelve years old and only produced its first handset about 2 and a half years ago and is evidently already at about one-half of Nokia the
current world leader's production rate. How long did you say Nokia's
been making handsets? Looking closer at Qualcomm's handset production
we see that all 700,000 per month comes from one production facility
in San Diego, and in one single flavor: CDMA. Now Tero, I'm no efficiency expert but I'd bet my last Swedish Krona that Nokia's
margins on its CDMA handset production couldn't hold a candle to Qualcomm's, especially since Nokia's production rate in CDMA is miniscule and they have to pay Qualcomm a royalty to boot. You say
that new CDMA phones from such world leaders as Motorola and Nokia are
technologically inferior. I agree. That's because both those companies
felt so threatened by Qualcomm that they took it upon themselves to
engineer their own CDMA chipsets which are relatively primitive next
to Qualcomm's 4th generation version, which means that Motorola and Nokia CDMA handsets are "brick phones" that suck up power and thus have heavy battery requirements. You also say that only big wireless
companies with big production volumes can succeed. Well being "big"
certainly hasn't been of much help to Motorola which as recently as
1996 was the world leader in wireless handsets and through the early
part of this decade "owned" the world mobile radio market with an
estimated 80% market share. Being "big" is not better than being right.And what makes Qualcomm "right" is that it is 100% CDMA which is
the fastest growing wirless technology platform.Your musings on the
economic conditions in Korea and Japan also begs a response. Now Tero,
I'm no economist but I do know that in spite of these adverse economic
conditions Korea added more than 1.5 million new CDMA subscribers
during the first quarter of this year and that Japan which currently
has 31 million wireless subscribers is still adding new ones at the rate of more than one million per month - and that's before the Japanese get to sign up for new, improved CDMA next month. Finally
Tero, you speak of "failed predictions" by Qualcomm and CDMA. What
about the failed predictions from your Nordic camp?- First it was that
CDMA was a hoax and that it didn't work, then that even if it did work that nobody would ever use it, then that if somebody did use it that the system would crash when fully loaded. Tero, in the "failed predictions" arena the Swedes truly are the best - their latest :
"We've got something better than CDMA its called W-CDMA and its coming
soon to a base station near you but in the meantime won't you please buy a few more antiquated barrels of GSM?" Get real Tero.
Regards,
John |
