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Dataquest's Richardson: Comment on Cellular Phone Technologies
London, Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- A comment by Peter Richardson, principal analyst, telecommunications group at Dataquest Inc, a market research unit of Gartner Group Inc., on the future of competing cellular phone technologies.
''If we're looking at the phone level, the handheld telephone is the last piece of the puzzle. It will follow the technology that wins out the battle.''
''There are a lot of cloudy issues about technology. It revolves around who has the intellectual property rights over bits of technology. There are lots of claims and counterclaims between Qualcomm and Ericsson.''
''Basically, we're heading toward third generation systems based on some Co-Divisional Multiple Access (CDMA).''
''Qualcomm is coming to the debate based on CDMA technology used in the U.S. It is different from, but similar to the wide- band CDMA proposed for Japan, and Europe.''
''Qualcomm has made some statements to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute saying ETSI had to approve CDMA 2000. Qualcomm is proposing CDMA 2000 for third generation phones. They're saying ETSI should approve CDMA 2000 in return for Qualcomm to allow use of its intellectual property contained within wide-band CDMA.''
''Currently, there are several systems in place in the world. Any new technologies will have to be backward- compatible.''
''Handsets will be multi-mode and will work with GSM and wide-band CDMA. Essentially, a handset is a computer with built- in microchips. There are conflicting issues with backwards compatibility. GSM is backward compatible with all chip-rates, but CDMA 2000 is only compatible with lowest chip rates. Chip rates are like processing speeds to personal computers.''
''There is inconclusive evidence that low chip rates lowers the quality somewhat. There have been moves by Ericsson saying that it will compromise by moving to a lower chip rate.''
''The direction the debate is taking is that the European industry will compromise and adopt a lower chip rate. There will be some rationalization to allow for standards to move forward. There will probably not be a global standard, but you'll have compatible standards.
08:09:53 01/13/1999
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