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

To: kech who wrote (7461)	3/12/2000 11:53:00 AM
From: Kent Rattey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

MOT and NOK feel they are protecting their profits, but it is inevitable that MOT and NOK will loose their ASIC business to QCOM, as the box makers flocked to INTC. They are holding out, but the the basic business principles of "economy of scale" and "outsourcing" will force capitulation. Mot has already headed down the road of no return, and the handwriting is on the wall. More and more of MOT's business will come QCOM's way until it is a given that they become their sole supplier of ASIC's. NOK on the other hand, is dying to reinvent the wheel as did ERICY to avoid the royalty, and that "Europeon pride" thingy. Unfortunately for them, QCOM has the patents on "round" and whether you call it a Goodyear(w-CDMA) or a Michilin, its still a round wheel. As a side note, my wife and I both work for carriers. Just so happens, her employer's wireless network is TDMA and mine is CDMA. Uniquely, we have used both for extended periods. There is no comparison. TDMA is inferior to CDMA from the users prospective. I currently utilize over 2,000 minutes a month, which comes out to about 100 mobile minutes a business day, or a little over an hour and a half each day. I am immune to isolated service areas because I roam extensively. IMO, CDMA will dominate wireless and QCOM is the economic solution for MOT and NOK. Mot's already in the pool and NOK will face dire economic consequences if they hold out much longer. They are wasting time and resources to create what already exists..... As another side, one of my clients is an ex-executive of Bellsouth Mobility, and we had a few drinks after the GTE Classic a few weeks ago. We began to discuss the stock market. I knew his background and I was real curious about his views on CDMA vs TDMA, so I mentioned QCOM. I was quite shocked to learn he owned the "Q"!!! He understood the superiority of the technology and felt BS made a major blunder going with TDMA, which he stated was done under the influence of a consulting firm out of Germany. Kent

To: kech who wrote (7461)	3/12/2000 11:39:00 PM
From: quidditch	Respond to of 13582

Tom, right you are, and a number of possible scenarios or explanations: 1. MOT is, according to Q, its fastest growing ASIC customer. 1xrt Plus aside, MOT, which is revenue driven and has economies of scale to make decent returns, seems to see CDMA as the wave; to buck it or slow down revenue growth by using its own (non-performing) chips will not make the bean counters happy in one corner of the MOT boardroom, even if the R&D constituents (like those at NOK) kick and scream. 2. The MSM 4500s, with WIL (Wireless Internet Launchpad) and MSM5000s offer a huge opportunity for carriers, makers of infrastructure, handsets, and application software to develop new value added products and new revenue options that are not now available (generally speaking, Thin Phone and pdq aside) in current wireless systems. I would think that MOT and other industry participants across the board would have to view 2.5G and gradual evolutions to 3G as a potential goldmine for diversified RF, electronics and software capabilities to develop new revenue streams. If 1xrt is not deployed, those opportunities are not realized. GPRS and EDGE are iffy at best and many more months away. 1XRT Plus, whatever that may turn out not to be, is an acknowledgement of the opportunity, if not the capacity to realize it via Q's ASIC. 3. NT had been said to turn a cold shoulder on HDR last year. But we also heard that USW had experimented with HDR and ended the trial indicating it wasn't up to snuff. Engineer has ideas on that and at the meeting Dr. J and Viterbi expressed puzzlement over that notion. As with ERICY's disinformation campaign (which you know firsthand as well as anyone on the thread--I recall your replies of wonder to some of Walt Houston's posts on the inadequacies of ERICY's 3G submission to ITU--turbo coding), there is probably an enormous amount of political posturing out there by the major carriers and infrastructure makers. Not wanting to piss off some customers, keeping competition among the vendors off balance and in the dark. This doesn't mean that Q's 1xrt will necessarily and inevitably become the standard (as this thread hopes it does)--only that the tea leaves are shuffled in mysterious ways for public consumption. 4. Within large organizations such as LU, NT and even NOK, there are bound to be political turf battles, the winners and losers of any of which bode well or ill for Q. During the last couple of years, NXTL's IDEN, T's TDMA, Voicestream's GSM (Omnipoint plus someone who acquired it) have all been active in the wireless explosion during this period, and this thread is probably unaware of for whom NT has been doing a lot of infrastructure build-out. (Kent might know this.) So there could be lots of compulsion for some high-up muck-a-mucks at NT to bad-mouth HDR, if indeed anything of that nature was said at all. We just have to hope that the imperatives and apparent superior technology brought together by Q's management win the day. See "2" above. Steve