Valueman,
Thanks for reporting on the analyst's meeting. At the shareholder meeting Irwin was very enthusiastic about the results that came out of the TABD group in Washington last week. The news accounts have been posted here, but not much discussion. I was wondering if he was similarly animated on this subject at the analyst's meeting.
He stressed that the proposal that was adopted was put forth originally by Deutch Telecom. As I understand it the proposal includes three modes of 3G service, and each mode will be backward compatible to BOTH the ANSI-41 and GSM-MAP networks. The first mode is called direct sequence and is essentially a single carrier [1.25 Megahertz ?] just like IS-95C. Irwin called this 1X cdma2000 if my notes are right. The second mode is called multicarrier, which he referred to as 3X cdma2000, which I took to mean it is 3 1.25 Mhz carriers combined. And the last mode is called TDD, which he did not talk about except to say it is for short range communications.
This framework was agreed to by basically the entire North American and European operator community, and represents the first time that there has been broad agreement on backward compatibility to BOTH core networks.
He said that within this framework they could now work to flesh out the technical details, which I assume means things like the chip rate that have been in dispute. [He did not mention the need to also get the Japanese and Koreans on board with the proposal]. He said that getting agreement on the details might involve compromises that Q would consider non-optimal, but basically with backward compatibility and a unified (although available in 3 modes) cdma air interface standard, Q would be achieving its objectives and the marketplace could then decide which mode was right for the services and available spectrum of each individual carrier. He didn't come out and say it, but what I inferred was Q would be happy to license its IPR to all comers under a standard that fit within this framework.
Can someone please correct me if I have misunderstood or misrepresented the TABD proposal.[it would not be the first time]
A few other random notes:
They will add handset capacity in Mexico later this year.
Have shipped 38 out of 60 globalstar gateways
Late in '99 will ship 10 to 15 thousand globalstar handsets
Will start installing WLL infrastructure in Brazil soon
Working toward a chip that will be optimized to work with various operating systems (such as Win CE)
The thin phones look great and will sell like hotcakes (my opinion)
R. Supulzio a very impressive, hands on, get it done kind of executive (my opinion)
Lastly, glad to hear Gregg is alive and well. Not much chance he will have to eat his monitor [or was it the cable he was going to dine on). My speculation is that ericy and Q! settle prior to the ITU meeting in Brazil and that it includes a royalty bearing cross-license agreement (with most of the flow going Q's way), agreement on technical 3G details like chip rate, and a joint venture/OEM relationship to manufacture 3G infrastructure and possibly handsets.
Best regards,
Jim |
