*W-CDMA versus cdma2000* Clark, it feels weird to call it W-CDMA instead of VW40 but I guess it has some legitimacy now.
You are right that Ericy would love dearly to differentiate [to use a little jargon] their product from others and they hope to do that with W-CDMA. But this must be based on a technical reality. Marketing can create artificial differences but let's stick to real differences for now. The biggie is the chip rate. According to the best experts on the planet, there is no advantage in the 4.0xx chip rate which Ericy is trying to make work in W-CDMA. Nor is there advantage in their compromise chip rate.
So no service provider has an incentive to use products with that chip rate. It is not backward compatible to any existing service and will detract from roaming capabilities. Any roaming would depend on multimode handsets which cost more and will be bigger and less efficient. Multimode handsets to enable a capricious chip rate are pointless. Nobody will want one.
Then there is the delay in getting W-CDMA to work assuming they can. Don't forget that Nokia and Motorola, although being early licensees were unable to make competitive ASICs so ended up buying from Q! It would be a daring bordering on loony investor who would put money on Ericy coming up with W-CDMA chips which work as well as cdma2000 and not only that, even if they DID make them work as well, there wouldn't be any service providers silly enough to buy them. They will want maximum compatibility with cdmaOne, GSM, cdma2000 and Vodafone/AirTouch, the biggest and ugliest has already said that's what they want and will bring their weight to bear to achieve convergence.
GSM service providers would have no incentive to buy W-CDMA over cdma2000 as an overlay. All that would mean is that USA, Chinese, Japanese, Korea, Australian [for the most part] and South American vistors would not be able to use their handsets unless they had bought a handset with multimode including W-CDMA. Since cdma2000 will predominate in their markets, they will prefer to buy a multimode handset with cdmaOne, cdma2000 and Globalstar as the functions. They will expect to use cdma2000 when international roaming and Globalstar to fill in the Swiss Cheese.
Any service provider offering W-CDMA will find the visitor will just switch to Globalstar or the cdma2000 supplier in the area.
Sure, you are right again, Ericy will try to stall, saying W-CDMA is coming and it'll be great. But at some stage they'll run out of suckers even though there's one born every minute. Singapore will now decide that the upgrade path is cdmaOne to either cdma2000 or W-CDMA so they will go ahead in a week or two and order cdmaOne although Tammy thought CDMA is had it in Asia [there are a lot of people going to be eating their monitors or hats]. They will order cdmaOne because that will give them a guaranteed upgrade path.
Once they have bought that, why on earth would they buy a weird chip rate which would necessitate ditching that equipment. Same for NTT who are under pressure to act now. They will immediately go with cdmaOne and upgrade in 3 or 4 years when the WWeb demand is established. Same for China. China will stop GSM expansion and start expanding cdmaOne as fast as they can go. Then they'll overlay GSM. Then they'll overlay with cdma2000 from Ericy or somebody but there is no reason for them to seek the weird W-CDMA technology and chip rate.
Multimode handsets will not be used to indulge capricious technologies.
I think a few people were concerned about 'the charge' in April but now understand that Q! will be paid about $1bn and the charge is related to tidying up all the related contractual obligations.
I see you are also starting to drool over the royalty of about 6%. It is very nice indeed I agree. Sad that it isn't 15% but much better than the 2% some people were thinking of.
I really cannot see why Ericy should pursue W-CDMA. I take your points, but am not convinced that W-CDMA is a threat.
Thanks for all your reviews over the past couple of days. The benefits look huge and the problems small.
Mqurice |
