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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (37352)	7/29/1999 9:19:00 AM
From: HairBall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

I have posted both a linear and semi-log chart on my chart page on the MDA Web Site at: homestead.com Below is my reply regarding QCOM. beta.siliconinvestor.com Regards, LG

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (37352)	7/29/1999 10:46:00 AM
From: Ruffian	Respond to of 152472

Is The War Coming To An End?> 7/28/99 - THIRD GENERATION - IS THE WAR COMING TO AN END? First of a three-part series by John Sullivan Jul. 28, 1999 (PCS WEEK, Vol. 10, No. 29 via COMTEX) -- The last year has been a remarkable one for the emerging third- generation (3G) wireless business. What started out looking like a repeat of the air interface "holy war" that rocked the PCS world a few years ago turned into something quite different. The struggle to shape the 3G market has spilled over into the arena of international trade and politics, and the initial customers for the technology - the world"s wireless carriers - have rebelled and taken a greater role in determining what 3G technology looks like. How the secondary customers - the world"s wireless users - will react, however, may well determine the fate of 3G, and their day is growing closer. Through much of 1998, the battle over 3G air interface standards was largely a repeat of the second-generation battle between GSM and CDMA, although complicated somewhat by the fact that both of the competing standards used code division. The CDMA world had cdma2000, while the GSM camp planned to evolve to something called wideband CDMA (W-CDMA). The two standards might have both been CDMA at heart, but some key details were very different. The reasons both sides trotted out to explain these differences were instructive. Chip Who? Although there were several technical parameters that differed between cdma2000 and W-CDMA, the most hotly contested was the chip rate, the speed at which the system"s microprocessors were to operate. In order to maintain compatibility with the existing IS-95 standard, CDMA supporters said they needed a chip rate that was an even multiple of IS-95"s 1.22 megachips per second (mcps). For cdma2000, the rate was 3.68 mcps. W-CDMA, on the other hand, used a rate of 4.096 mcps. Attempts to harmonize the two standards tended to get hung up on the chip rate. The GSM camp (and you can mostly read this as L.M. Ericsson AB [ERICY]) insisted that lowering the chip rate below 4.096 mcps would unacceptably degrade system performance. The worldwide carrier base didn"t understand, Ericsson said, why their 3G systems should be hobbled with a lower chip rate simply to ease the migration path of a few North American carriers. On the other hand, the CDMA camp (and you can mostly read this as San Diego -based Qualcomm Inc. [QCOM]) insisted that the difference in chip rate would have little or no impact on system performance. CDMA carriers were the only ones coming from a code division-based 2G system, they said, so they were the only ones to whom chip rate really mattered. Since GSM systems would have to make a significant change to reach W-CDMA anyway, they argued, the only reason to insist on a chip rate incompatible with IS-95 was to impose a similar burden on CDMA carriers. A Pox On Both Your Houses That kind of competitive maneuvering tended to dominate the 3G debate through most of last year. Qualcomm insisted on harmonizing the two standards so that it would gain access to Europe and other GSM markets, while Ericsson tried to wall off its markets by keeping the standards separate. At the bottom of the whole mess were intellectual property rights. Qualcomm claimed it had patents that covered several key components of W-CDMA. Ericsson claimed that W-CDMA didn"t infringe anybody"s patents. More to the point, Qualcomm drew a line in the sand and told the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) that it would not license its patents for W-CDMA development without convergence. This upset the ITU greatly. The group was in the midst of culling through several air interface proposals for IMT-2000, its planned single global 3G standard. The ITU"s rules demanded that the selected technology have unfettered patent access. If Qualcomm and Ericsson could not agree on the patent rights - and forced the whole issue into the courts where it might not be seen again for years - ITU threatened that it would be forced to drop both standards from consideration. (Part two of the series will appear in the Aug. 4 issue of PCS Week.)