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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ruffian who wrote (5241)	1/14/2000 11:53:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 13582

Gee Ruff, NTT sounds as though they are in trouble from that interview. No more "We are going W-CDMA and launching service in 2001." Now it's "We'll use whatever emerges as the 3G standard". They are bleating about royalties, pushing the old Karl Marx idea, "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs". They say royalties should be fair, reasonable and whine whine whine. In case they hadn't noticed, Qualcomm royalties are already absurdly cheap and as ASIC and handset prices drop, the payment is going to dwindle to a derisory amount. It seems that the old Korean 5.5% figure reported a couple of years ago might be exaggerated [I think it was Irwin Jacobs the other day saying the figure is lower than that - implying something around 3 or 4% though he said contracts preclude disclosure]. That is a low, low royalty. GSM total royalties are apparently about 15% for a newcomer to buy the technology and get into the business. Perhaps Ericsson and the GSM Goose-steppers would like to sell Qualcomm the right to produce GSM technology for, say, 5%? I bet they won't!! Here is the NTT guy, pushing the line that Qualcomm should be paid some sort of fee for developing CDMA, but along the lines of an hourly rate for proveable engineer's time. No creativity bonus I suppose: <Q: Do you have many patents on wideband CDMA? A: Yes, we do. But the industry now believes that things should be open, fair, reasonable. One should pay money for the technology, since the company that developed it paid for research and development. America backs this view, but then you have Qualcomm charging a high royalty [for its CDMA technology]. Since we don't have a contract with them, I don't know what they're charging, but I've heard it's in the order of several percentage points. What it means is that Qualcomm could take a cut of several percent from the sale of our 3G handsets. But in the case of wideband CDMA, we own some of the technology, as do Lucent and Qualcomm. So it'll be difficult to sort through all the patents. That's why we're calling for more cooperation. In the end, users will have to bear the cost, and we want to keep it within reason.> Whine, whine, whine. If they want to keep things reasonable for consumers, they could take a look at the extorquerationate regular line prices they charge their customers in Japan! Qualcomm has already made the royalties too cheap [in my opinion] and there should be a minimum fee so that as average wholesale prices drop, we don't lose our shirts! Gee, they have complicated patent ownership in W-CDMA [VW40]which is hard to sort through? They could cut the Gordian knot by dumping VW40 and going straight to cdma2000, then they could pay only a single low fee of about 5%. Nobody has yet come up with any technical merit for VW40 [VapourWear40] over cdma2000. Neither does it seem to be near a real commercial system which works in anything smaller than a truck. Since it fragments the technological work to develop it, costs more [because of the patent claims as well as the need to make handsets multimode], is less efficient [because of the multimode nonsense and the chip rate is too high], there seems no reason to develop it. Service providers won't be impressed by the need to waste a customer's money on inefficient technology - they want any money in the minute provider's pocket. A multimode handset will be more expensive than a single mode handset. If the NTT man was really worried about consumers, he could go with the single mode and deliver a really cheap, highly effective service. So we can see that he is crying crocodile tears about the high royalties and the poor consumers. Vapourware, is still in vogue. Now NTT is trying on the King's great Vapourwear raiment despite Ericy being shown to be naked under a year ago. King NTT! What a joke they are. They also seem not to understand the data rate that their cdmaOne competitors are now offering, thinking it is 14kbps. At least he understands that this is going to be big time. With Japanese expected to have 3 devices each in 10 years. Probably more - one in the car, a little one, a big one, and teleputer one, a 'WebReader' one. The fear-factor now that Hitachi is onto HDR must be starting to swirl around NTT HQ! [I like the Q! in HQ!] How long will the VW40 dyke hold? Mqurice

To: Ruffian who wrote (5241)	1/15/2000 1:31:00 PM
From: slacker711	Respond to of 13582

I think that the couple of post by Ruffian on NTT (Thanks Ruffian!) are really good news. This has been the first time that I have read NTT acknowledge that W-CDMA wont really be ready by March 2001 (64 kbps? <g>). This thread has always believed this to be true but it is nice to have it confirmed.....It looks like the door is open for DDI/IDO to get a giant head-start on NTT. However the head-start wont mean anything unless CDMA operators start to concentrate on content.... I think this thread has been consistently looking at speed as the end-all of the wireless battles. I think it is time to start looking at the various content offerings. Yes, once speeds are great enough it will open the WWW to surfing.....but this is really only practical for notebook users (and some PDA's). The success of i-mode in Japan shows that content matters! NTT was able to use their limited bandwidth and build the most successful data offerings in the world. We need to start seeing this type of offerings from SK Telecom or PCS....the increased bandwidth should allow them to create even better services. However, as of yet, I have seen very little evidence of this type of innovation in CDMA. All of the data offerings (WAP/i-mode) are technology agnostic....I really hope that CDMA begins to use it's inherent advantages to deliver data in a form that is useful on the average wireless phone (Startac/Thinphone type). Just my thoughts....I will try and post more later. Slacker