Clark,
Having lived through those eras, here are a few comments.
1. George Schmitt probably never will say that he was wrong, but then alot of companies have gone down on ego, haven't they?
2. I would hope that Stanford has raised their academic standards by now and asked the gentleman to go find another insititution to defame the name of.
3. The true story was that in the begining, the proposal to Airtouch was to fit as many people as possible on the system, since they were facing a brick wall of subscriber growth in 1991, and Qualcomm proposed to keep the voice and call quality the same as analog, which meant that they could support another 4-5 dB of link margin while letting the BER slip. This would let the capacity grow by ALOT. But when the Airtouch brass (Craig Farrel, Dr. Lee) came down, they wanted to hear what it sounded like with a perfect link margin, then Dr. Lee asked to produce results all the way down the curve. From that the new voice quality and link margin budgets were established and the capacity was readjusted. What turned out was a much better system. Improved call quality, excellent voice quality, along with still 10x capacity. but of course, in the first demo in 1989 (built, designed, and done in less than 3 months including 2 basestations and 3 phones) the goal was to replace analog and the higher capacity claims were touted. In 1990/1991 when it became reality and QCOM had backing from Airtouch, Ameritech, Nynex, Mot, AT&T, the decision to roll back to 10x was made for mobile and 20-24x for WLL. It has been that way ever since. I think the system we got as a result of it is MUCH better than could have been anticipated at that time.
I am happy to have been a part of it, but I only got to build what the systems engineers designed. there are some of the best systems designers in the world sitting behind those walls. |
