Hi Johnnie, See "CDMA Development Group" for lots of information. cdg.deltanet.com is their address. There are many CDMA licensees who will be making handsets, base stations, car electronics linkage [Nippon Denso]. Motorola, Ericsson and others conduct their own CDMA developments outside Qualcomm's patents, but Qualcomm has always done the opposite of Apple. They have made entry as easy as possible to as many as possible with a view to ensuring universal acceptance. More money in making $1 from a billion people than $1000 from 1000. Qualcomm is going to get big heap royalties. Others are not bothering doing their own developments because cheaper and success more likely to pay Qualcomm for their expertise.
Qualcomm also manufactures itself [ASICs, base stations, Omnitracs, Eudora etc] as well as sharing joint ventures [Sony/Qualcomm handsets, Nortel/Qualcomm infrastructure, Loral/Hyundai et al Globalstar, Nextwave Telecom] which is profitable and ensures CDMA flows to market. If others won't do it or can't, Qualcomm is there. By having understanding, they are able to be the high bidder for pcs. The price Nextwave are offering, some $2.5bn, for 100 million pops is $25per person. $2.5bn sounds a lot, but is a bargain. That is the price for the right to build an information highway from anywhere right to a person's brain. We pay groteque amounts of money for roads, aeroplanes and the physical world. Those physical objects are only information suppliers - they work by carting us around or things to us. We are in the process of moving from a physical world to direct neural stimuli. And we love it. Look at us clicking away on our computers, jabbering on phones, watching tv, reading magazines, going to movies, listening to radio, taking drugs to enhance our perceptions - or destroy them if our perceptions are unpleasant.
Buying land for a highway is expensive. Buying frequency for communication is cheap. Demand will be huge so efficiency must be maximum; CDMA is it. Qualcomm is doing it.
$25person needs only income of $3 per year per person to cover it, plus depreciation depending on how long the right to the frequency lasts. Right now maybe 1:10 might use the service so need $300 per year, plus depreciation. Within 5 years, maybe 30% of people will have a pcs phone, so that $300 goes down to $100. After 10 years, who isn't going to have a phone? Analog and TDMA simply can't compete in the mass cheap market. The huge profits telecoms have extracted from us this century are going to shrink by orders of magnitude as competition rips them to bits. Qualcomm is giving us choice. Price bottom? I think we are there, that's why I bought more, but people can easily vote it lower if they like and hold it there for a few years until P:E = 7. We need chicken entrails to determine "support levels". I can see there are psychological price points, but I don't have a sensible way of deciding where those are. |
