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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: moat who wrote (203)	9/18/1999 6:24:00 PM
From: waverider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12235

You can come to our party in San Diego...maybe! Rick <H>

To: moat who wrote (203)	12/15/1999 6:48:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12235

*Hong Kong Phooey to CDMA* A little history, to answer the question: <Can you explain to me what happened to CDMA in Hong Kong? I understand CDMA was introduced to Hong Kong by Hutchison Telecommunications many years ago (approx same time as Korea). To this day Hong Kong really don't have many CDMA subscribers .... Do you know what happened? and what is the likely future of Hong Kong? Why ask this question? ... we are all wondering how Europe will unfold over time ... > Hong Kong was the very first commercial CDMA network to sell CDMA seriously and not as a trial network. Trenton and Los Angeles had trial networks earlier in 1995, but they didn't amount to much at the time. Motorola supplied the network and was supposed to supply the handsets but they were unable to supply the handsets. Qualcomm came to the rescue and supplied the handsets! Which shows that although the handset division is not making much money these days, it was a very good move to form Qualcomm Personal Electronics with Sony to produce handsets. Without that, the delays to CDMA might have been years more or even, gulp, forever... Korea's systems started operation in April 1996 and they were far more successful, partly because there wasn't serious competition and there was no GSM in Korea. The Korean government gave an edict that CDMA was to be used, against the judgement of plenty of Korean telecom companies. The Motorola system in Hong Kong seems to have been a lemon. There have been other problematic Motorola systems but this is the only one I'm aware of that seems to have slowed development of a whole area. Meanwhile, other phone systems in Hong Kong and their handsets developed really quickly and CDMA hasn't. You'd think they'd run out of spectrum because Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated and gabbling cellphone places on the planet. I suppose there are heaps and heaps of micro base stations. Maybe Hong Kong has been caught up in the overall Chinese political shenanigans so any further adoption of cdmaOne has been held up by Beijing politics. Maybe the poor performance initially made them gunshy and now they'll wait for very, very clear advantages. Actually, I have no idea how many CDMA subscribers there are in Hong Kong, but I guess it isn't more than 200,000, which isn't many compared with the total which must be way over 1m. But 10% or maybe 20% market share is not bad. Competing networks can just cut their price to compete and keep customers, until they run out of spectrum or the capital upgrades get too expensive and CDMA becomes the sensible way to overlay. Those TDMA mode suppliers must be hoping for EDGE to rescue them, or maybe VW40. They might be in big trouble soon - CDMA in Hong Kong won't stand still. WWeb is coming...and I suppose there have been network improvements. Ramsey Su ought to know. Hey, Ramsey, what's up in Hong Kong and CDMA? Sorry I don't have the definitive answer, but that's a good start. I don't think Hong Kong is relevant to Europe's CDMA adoption, which will be WWeb-based. It seems the spectrum for GSM might have enough capacity for voice-only until HDR or W-CDMA [the cdma2000 clone] is ready to roll out. GPRS is going to be interesting in Europe. We don't hear about capacity problems in Europe yet. Mqurice