Haven't heard of this. W-CDMA will probably be tinkered with. When ETSI accepted it last January, there were some minor changes to appease the Siemens/Alcatel/Motorola consortium. Some features were lifted from their losing proposition and grafted on W-CDMA - Siemens, Alcatel and Motorola declared victory, even though they suffered a stinging defeat when their basic architecture was rehected. W-CDMA will be changed somewhat if it's accepted by the Americans - there needs to be feeling that there is contribution from all major parties. As long as the basic design stays the same, Nokia and Ericsson should maintain their edge as the engineers of the standard.
It's ironic that Siemens, Alcatel and Motorola all initially misjudged the potential of GSM and fell disastrously behind in network & handset sales. And then they went ahead and repeated the same mistake with W-CDMA; like Nokia and Ericsson, they could have been concentrating on W-CDMA R&D for half a decade now, instead they insisted on developing their own proposal and diverted money and manpower into a standard that went down the toilet. No matter what they do now, they are years behind.
In GSM, Ericsson was initially the undisputed number one in networks and Nokia in handsets - later Ericsson used their considerable network know-how to launch a strong handset division and Nokia translated their handset expertise into the world's strongest GSM-1800 network biz. They have now scripted a revival of the same play - Ericsson has all the initial W-CDMA network contracts and Nokia is the preferred handset partner of NTT-Docomo with an already functioning W-CDMA handset prototype. After establishing themselves as leading companies in their area of core competence they will no doubt attempt the old GSM switcheroo and slug it out in both networks and handsets. Well, it worked once - and Motorola et al have repeated their parts as sluggish late-comers reluctant to commit to a new standard just as they did back in -93.
I feel the most important thing now is not to accept the compatibility to IS-95, then GSM remains far more attractive to countries like China intending to upgrade to W-CDMA.
Tero |
