Conspiracy or not?
Just for grins, my suspicions as to what is happening:
1) Early 98 - Ericsson proposes a W-CDMA different from CDMA-2000 and says it has IPR and that its standard will have no trouble going through the ITU. NTT, European operators et al don't know and don't care about IPR, and so they just follow. After all Ericsson is one of the biggest in the world and must know what they are doing. Right? Also remember that NTT DoCoMo is Japanese and hence likes consensus.
2) Mid 98 - Qualcomm says must have convergence, and that it has IPR to block both ITU and deployment. Ericsson says 'don't believe them', so the operators continue happily along for the same reason as above.
3) Mid 99 - The American GSM operators, worried about cheap upgrades to 3g from their CDMAOne competitors, back Ericsson.
3) Mid to late 98 - Qualcomm says 4.096 won't give higher performance, and in fact is, for practical purposes, unworkable. Again Ericsson says 'don't believe them'. The operators are starting to worry. In the most built out areas (Europe and Japan) they need a more efficient system. (Note that in Japan NTT is worried about a system that gives their competitor an advantage, but unlike their American counterparts they are against the wall on capacity.) But even though the operators are starting to worry they still trust Ericsson.
4) Charlene, letters in pocket, starts making the rounds talking about collusion among European cell phone manufacturers and restraint of trade. Big worry to all European and Japanese manufacturers, but really, really big worry to Ericsson which has no fall back position since they are the only major manufacturer without CDMAOne capacity.
5) ITU says there will be no 3g CDMA standard
6) Not a peep out of the CDMAOne vendors since they know that they have an upgrade to 3g with or without ITU, but the overloaded operators (none of which are CDMAOne<g>) are really sweating now.
5) Late 98 - Ericsson, shows the first, inevitible cracks. Says lets do 3.84. Lets drop several of the patent suits. This completely blows the overloaded operators trust in Ericsson. 'Why didn't Qualcomm blink?' they ask. 'Didn't Ericsson say 4.096 was a performance issue and that they had it in the bag?'
6) Late December 98 - Schism. The overloaded operators must have a more efficient standard, although they don't really care which one. (NTT may have a preference for non-CDMAOne compatible, but that preference is second to the need for some/any standard.) They absolutely need it since both Europe and Japan are more densely populated and have much higher penetration rates. And now they trust Ericsson not at all. This is not the same as saying that they back CDMA-2000, but now they really will start looking for a compromise, and they won't trust Ericsson for information about IPR and capacity. Once they finish their homework (betcha a lot of lawyers and engineers are getting a workout right now) they will then converge on CDMA-2000 or something very similar.
Clark
PS I think the kicker is the letters mentioned by Perry LaForge. Although not currently being used as a weapon, they are like a backup doomsday device aimed at Ericsson. They absolutely cannot win. The only question is how long Ericsson will take to admit this to themselves, and will they try to take the whole world with them in some kind of trade war.
PPS I made a prediction on the Nokia thread that before the end of the year we would see 4 (or more) announcements from the Ericsson team, but none from the IS-95 camp except as calmly worded rebuttals. The French announcement counts as 1. Only three more to go. |
