For all you worry warts, I picked up the following snippet on the New Q thread. It's from a recent interview with Andrew Viterbi:
WDN: What do you foresee in terms of competition to CDMA?
VITERBI: As you know, for 3G, the vast majority of carriers, governments and standards
bodies are embracing CDMA. There is a slightly different flavor, which I don't think we need to
go into, but it's all CDMA, it's all spread spectrum, and it's all using direct sequence. It's all
fundamentally the same thing, as was IS-95, or CDMA1, in an evolution. And, obviously, in 10
years, you're going to evolve and improve the standard, which is exactly what has been done.
Qualcomm, of course, with support from a number of other manufacturers, including Lucent
[LU] (more) and I believe Ericsson [ERICY] (more), are now evolving the original CDMA1
IS-95 into a further evolution which is now being called 1X. So evolving, we're getting capacities
that are at least double than the original 1S-95.
More important, I think the trend is toward data, and there we're getting even larger beyond that
doubling. We're getting another factor of three to four by recognizing that we have packet data
and making all the allocations based on optimizing the throughput of packet data, by recognizing
there's a strong influence by the environment which you can take advantage of in wireless data
that you can't take advantage of in wireless voice. So we advocate very strongly the separation
of data and voice into separate carriers; a carrier being a one-and-a-quarter megahertz of
spectrum. Others are pushing other ideas which we don't think are nearly as far along.
So, it's going to be some flavor of CDMA, and I think the demands for high-speed wireless
data, which will be competitive in speed with DSL and cable..., [and]Something you can carry
with you, and you're not tethered to the wall. That's the major trend.
WDN: What about any challenges en route to 3G?
VITERBI: Do I see other technologies other than CDMA that are challenging? Frankly, I'll be
very blunt and say that I don't think EDGE [a TDMA technology that's an evolution of GSM]
has very much of a chance. Packet data over GSM, so called GPRS is happening. It's a very,
very slow service, far slower than IS-95b, which is already in operation in Korea and Japan and
shortly in the U.S. - I'm not sure exactly when, but it'll be this year.
There's 200 million people with GSM, and if carriers can entice people to buy new handsets
based on the GSM standard, they can go with packet data. But it'll be a relatively slow packet
data, and it'll be mildly expensive - far more expensive than the CDMA handsets that already in
IS-95a can handle the same speed as GPRS, and 'b' can handle approximately two-to-four
times the speed of GPRS. So, that, I don't see as being any challenge to CDMA in efficiency
and performance. If the Europeans want to spend a lot of money to develop it, that's another
story.
As you know, the Japanese have completely committed to 3G-CDMA for their ongoing data
requirements. The Europeans, however, do have this EDGE technology, which [is a]
technologically I don't think offers much promise. So, I don't see that as a threat.
If you want to go way out, to the people who are promoting fourth- and fifth-generation
ultra-wide band schemes, which require a gigahertz which they hope would become unlicensed -
well, I say that likely, if at all, it's 25 years off. The regulatory issues are enormous, and I think
the technology's probably a decade away from being realizable. So whether that will be
economically feasible, in addition to technically conceivable, who knows what may come along
in the next decade?
Will we have short-range optical? That I can't say, but for the time being, I think wireless is being
very well-served by CDMA for the next decade, easily. |
