Mike, Lindy, Unq, Stan & others, here are some contrasting views & info & rumors I have culled this a.m., partly from the "proper" keep-off-the-grass Qualcomm 500 thread:
1) Excerpt from an article:
Qualcomm chief executive Irwin Jacobs, along with Johan Lodenius, vice president of marketing in the technologies group, outlined steps for processor families to handle the 64-kbit/s data capabilities of IS-95B, a Qualcomm-backed second generation of the IS-95 standard, as well as the higher data rates of two generations of 3G capabilities planned, 1XRTT and 3XRTT.
Qualcomm's data-oriented iMSM 4000 and 4100 are designed to work with either Symbian or Microsoft environments. The 3G 1XRTT chip on the drawing boards at Qualcomm will be dubbed the M/CSM5000 family, supporting data rates of up to 153 kbits/s. On Thursday, Lucent Technologies Inc. announced it will be the first user of the basestation version of the chip, CSM5000, with a goal of very rapid rollout of 1XRTT basestations for all of Lucent's carrier customer base.
Qualcomm's strategy for dominating baseband chip supply is much more central to the company's success than in previous years. That's because the CDMA pioneer has sold its infrastructure business to LM Ericsson, and announced two weeks ago that its phone handset business was also up for sale.
At that time, reports emerged that Qualcomm was playing hardball with Philips Semiconductors, denying the company the CDMA license previously held by VLSI Technology, which Philips acquired. Lodenius insisted, however, that a license will be renegotiated with Philips, and that Qualcomm has no intention of keeping large players out of the CDMA market.
For its part, the digital cellular group formerly with VLSI came to PCS '99 in high spirits, since it is the first to be fully integrated with Philips. At the show, Philips announced creation of a telecom terminals business unit under former VLSI vice president Thierry Laurent. It will incorporate groups for cellular Europe, cellular USA, corded and cordless technologies, and display drivers ? in essence, all the components critical to digital cellular phones and PDAs.
Ronald Wong, market segment manager for communication products in the new unit, said that Philips now can combine the TDMA and CDMA cores from VLSI with its own IF and RF mixed-signal devices to provide end-to-end design of handset boards.
Philips will be announcing a strategy at next month's Telecom '99 show in Geneva to add more integer-processing cores to its portfolio to handle the array of data transport alternatives being offered for the GSM marketplace.
Diversity is necessary in these markets because of the tortuous path to 3G in all the air interface segments. Support for WAP, which requires minimal change in software stacks for baseband processors, was everywhere at PCS '99.
Nokia Telecommunications Inc. (Irving, Texas) launched two phones ? the 6100 for TDMA and the 7100 for GSM ? incorporating WAP support, as well as dedicated WAP gateways and data-optimization servers for the cellular infrastructure.
Nokia will go a step further than other WAP vendors by licensing its microbrowser, based on technology from Spyglass Inc., as well as its WAP protocol stack, thereby enabling a market of third-party WAP servers to emerge, said Haroon Alvi, director of business development. The first such partnership was announced at PCS '99, when Hewlett-Packard Co. agreed to offer HP-UX WAP servers interoperating with Nokia equipment.
As the GSM camp turns its eye to GPRS and Edge, the CDMA vendors are looking toward cdma2000. Though Qualcomm pushed hard for a second generation of IS-95 to extend circuit-switched data support to 64 kbits/s, most North American carriers in the CDMA Developers Group simply weren't interested. By contrast, developers in Japan and Korea are anxious to roll out IS-95B services as quickly as possible. Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDMA Developers Group, said this may be due in part to the fact that many Asian nations do not have a high number of consumers who are regular Internet users, and thus find cellular services like GSM's Short Message Service and IS-95B to be more significant than U.S. customers.
"Most carriers agree that open interfaces are better than proprietary solutions," said La Forge.
Meanwhile, Vodafone's Farrill said interest in cdma2000's 1XRTT interface involves "much more than the significant increase in speed you get. You also make the fundamental change from circuit to packet.
"Sometimes markets need these discontinuities," he said. "If the step is a relatively small one, the carriers find it harder to rationalize, whereas a big leap forward can push them into new markets."
A further wrinkle could be the wireless application of voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), which already is proving popular in wireline environments and could become important in digital cellular handsets. Nokia's Clark said that company is closely monitoring the work of the 3GIP Working Group to determine if VoIP should be added to future 2.5G and 3G networks.
"Voice-over-IP is even a longer uncertainty," said Kohavi of DSP Communications. "Over time, we are certain packet will be the way to go for both data and voice. But it will be at least two years before VoIP is a proven technology in a wireline environment, and quite a bit after that before it becomes commonplace in wireless."
Full story for above:
eet.com
2) Something apparently used in WSJ interactive from an SI poster; I know we've discussed this before, but GSM/China is interesting to me anyway
WSJ>
September 23, 1999
InterDigital Interest
Mr. Anders,
RE: ("Shareholders' Site Disagrees With Analysts on InterDigital") I found it
interesting that The Wall Street Journal was the first to give Bill Dalglish's
site some exposure and I'm sure many more writers will follow your lead.
I'm also happy you provided some comments from those who claim to follow
the industry.
The article states: "Industry analysts say InterDigital was beaten in the
wireless business by heavyweights like Qualcomm. 'If things had turned out
differently some years ago, and technology had gone a different way, we
could be talking about InterDigital as the billion-dollar giant today instead of
Qualcomm. But it just didn't work out like that,' says Iain Gillott."
The only thing Qualcomm (QCOM) has beaten IDC in is the licensing of
their technology and as investors in IDC we are hoping for the same
success. As industry analysts know, Qualcomm sold their infrastructure unit
to L.M. Ericsson (ERICY) because it was a losing part of the business and
also their joint venture on handsets hasn't been that profitable.
So how has QCOM amassed all this wealth? If we look at the CDMA
wealth alone the bottom line is licensing and alliance revenues and the sales
of ASICs to the licensees who are unable to design their own.
Let's look at some numbers. There are well over 200-million users of
TDMA/GSM and 30-million users of CDMA or Qualcomm's IS-95 so what
does Mr. Gillott mean when he said "if technology had gone the other way"?
With GSM/TDMA users outnumbering IS-95 users 7-to-1 what he doesn't
realize is that it has gone the other way. China was to be a prime target for
CDMA or IS-95, yet billions in GSM contracts have been awarded in 1999
while very little or nothing has been awarded for CDMA. Assuming
InterDigital was as successful as Qualcomm in the licensing of their patents
and we look at the number of users, who's the better investment of the two?
InterDigital has less than 20 licensees and Qualcomm around 60.
The patent dispute between Motorola and InterDigital was a devastating loss
to us investors and sent all the analysts covering IDC to the exits. Had the
Supreme Court's Markman decision come a few days earlier things might be
much different now. For InterDigital's fate to be sealed by jurors who had no
knowledge or understanding of patents or the technology is a miscarriage of
justice that will be righted in the ERICY versus IDC litigation. It was during
the Markman pre-trial hearing that ERICY and Qualcomm came to terms
and ended their dispute and many of us InterDigital investors feel the same
will happen with our dispute.
With ERICY laying claim to have built almost 50 % of the infrastructure for
the over 200 million users of GSM/TDMA the revenues that could come
from ERICY alone in this litigation is staggering. It will also produce
licensing agreements from the many companies who are lurking in the
shadows hoping ERICY can give IDC the knockout punch.
If 1.5 % for infrastructure and 3 % for handsets are reasonable numbers,
how much might IDC have coming for over 200-million users of which many
are on second and third-generation handsets? With almost $2 in cash and
another dollar in tax write-offs this stock is priced like an option with no
expiration.
Most analysts think Qualcomm holds the keys to the castle technology-wise
and I hope you might ask the analysts that if this is so, then why has Nokia --
the leading handset manufacturer in the world -- chosen InterDigital to help
them in their 3-G effort ?
Jim Lurgio
jlurgio@bigfoot.com
URL for above: Message 11345160 |
