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

To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (1180)	12/6/1999 3:37:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 12249

*HDR licences and royalties*<Qualcomm is aggressively marketing its broadband data platform for CDMA, which management expects to deploy 1-2 year before the widespread implementation of 3G. The platform promises to offer up to 2 MB data rates over a packet network. At this point, the major obstacle to acceptance of this platform is royalty negotiations with infrastructure vendors. Carriers' high interest levels are expected to speed up deployment. > Qualcomm can easily get the infrastructure vendors to stop messing around. They can announce that they will be selling 5 HDR licences to the highest bidders with no more issued after 1 January 2000. That should generate a bit of pushing and shoving. Let's hope Qualcomm realizes that as electronic gizzard prices drop heavily over the next 10 years, that 5% of a $200 handset might look attractive now, but 5% of a $10 handset won't sustain a $1tn market capitalisation. Maybe royalties should be a fixed $20 per device or some such. Then again, bearing in mind that the $$ sign has a tenuous link to value and is at the whim of politicians and Alan Green$pan, maybe a % is better. The good thing is that billions and billions of CDMA devices will be sold over the next 10 years so whether 5% or $20, it's going to be a LOT of money. Mq

To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (1180)	12/6/1999 3:58:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 12249

Jim, I don't get it that Q! needs a licence from IDC for anything mobile. GSM isn't IDC property is it? Sorry about your post - I thought I had answered it all. I'll go back. I didn't look to see who has a grip on GSM because it doesn't matter to me who has it. GSM people claimed that Qualcomm was being greedy at 5% royalties, so I suppose Q! can buy GSM royalties for maybe 3% [since the GSM people wouldn't be calling the kettle black would they]. All that matters is that Q! can get the necessary GSM technology to clip into an ASIC to offer dual mode CDMA/GSM so Europe can be overlaid with CDMA. If other GSM operators have to pay IDC royalties, then I guess Qualcomm [or the company they associate with] will have to do so too. I don't think it's a big problem and the whole GSM stuff is going to go away in 3 or 4 years anyway as the GSM air interface ceases to exist on planet earth [in any significant market anyway]. WWeb is going to happen and fast. Internet time is what will drive that. Telecom people who grew up during government monopolies still don't get it. They are still surprised at the rate of development of the cellular world. That pace will accelerate. It is still a war - envy and jealousy of Qualcomm lurks in multitudes of minds. Those people will steal if they think they can get away with it. They will continue to pull stunts like Ericy did over CDMA before finally admitting they were wrong, untruthful, deceptive and dishonest - they said they would deny the request if customers wanted CDMA - that was untrue. They claimed to have invented CDMA yet caved into Qualcomm on the courthouse steps. They paid Bill Frezza [according to Bill anyway] while he mounted a substantial campaign including calling Irwin Jacobs a fraud and Qualcomm a sham which would end in shareholder lawsuits. The battle continues Jim, but Qualcomm is ascendant. CDMA is outnumbered in number of subscribers right now, but one should not invest on that basis. Model T outnumbered Lexus a million to none. But there are a lot more Lexi than T. Speaking of T, watch the TDMA space over the next 3 years... Check the CDMA growth rate versus the GSM growth rate. Check %, not absolute handset numbers. CDMA is now around 50m and Dec 2000 will be around 122m. GSM will grow rapidly too, but the gap will be narrowing. GSM is Toast! It just has a role in roaming while the overlays are built out. There is spectrum shortage, infrastructure overload, data demands, WWeb, capital cost, handset and device cost all pushing for increasingly rapid overlay of GSM with CDMA. At some stage, GSM expansion in existing networks will be uneconomic, then the switch to CDMA will be spectacular. I don't know anything about Ericy vs IDC in Texas. No, I haven't been drinking seawater, but I'm going to inspect wave functions at Piha now. Mqurice