Tero:
What a bull-poopy answer and you know it! Your argument has been that CDMA handsets are systemically inferior and this confers a permanent advantage to TDMA-based GSM. You are now trying to suggest that W-CDMA...which does not even exist yet...will somehow overcome the handset mass/battery life problem so as to seamlessly provide migration for all the happy GSM customers. Huh?
You are also ignoring IS-95C and cdma2000...the latter being, at a minimum, equivalent in specification to W-CDMA and available far sooner. You left out roughly 1mm CDMA subscribers and also ignored the network deployments that are taking place in almost forty countries around the world. Your 100mm versus 16mm argument conveniently ignores that GSM had a four-to-five year headstart on CDMA...one would hope that GSM had collected a few more subscribers to date.
Most comically, you completely ignore the obvious...that ERICY must believe that direct sequence spread spectrum (i.e. CDMA) is a superior air interface or IT WOULD HAVE NEVER ATTEMPTED TO PROMULGATE W-CDMA AS A 3G MIGRATION PATH. It cannot get any more simple or any more obvious. If TDMA-based GSM was as superior as you pontificate, than ERICY et al would have stuck with it and buried IS-95 under the weight of its alleged inferiority. Are the Finnish familiar with an old Yankee saying, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em"?
Finally, your supposition that operator profitability matters only to the operators' shareholders is somewhat correct...but the conclusion that you draw from this inference is horribly wrong. WIRELINE telephony was predicated on a vast investment in facilities-based equipment and monopoly ownership of the wire running into the consumers' home. Despite ATT's break-up, this monopolist mentality still seems to be the rule of the day at Ma Bell. WIRELESS telephony, which used to be a comfortable duopoly in the U.S., has recently turned into a free-for-all with the potential for many competitors. Given your statist perspectives, you can be forgiven for missing the free market implications of such a change...but, don't worry...I will explain it to you. In a competitive free market, with declining barriers to entry and a more-or-less commodity product/service, the high-cost provider either reduces his costs or ultimately goes out of business. In simply english, if Airtouch's cash cost per minute is $0.06 and ATT's is $0.08, then ATI can price its service at $0.07 and still earn a cash profit while ATT (if it matches price) loses money on every minute delivered. Ultimately this relationship MEANS EVERYTHING...because ATT's owners will ultimately hold management accountable for the company's economic performance, or lack thereof.
The above economic argument is the reason why ERICY let the W-CDMA genie out of the bottle. Faced with the inevitable consequence of a structurally inferior air interface, Ericsson needed to act. Until you directly can refute this argument, with something besides misdirection and statistical hyperbole, I find the balance of your arguments to be of little value.
Best regards,
Gregg |
