I believe that SKT is simply playing it's WCDMA card at the insistence of NTT. I believe that they will drop the WCDMA facade to acquiesce to their government's demand to implement CDMA2000.
You could be right about this (and I sincerely hope that you are), but if SKT does end up making such a reversal, it looks like it'll have to come as a result of the decisions of the company's executives rather than the mandates of government officials.
At this point, the WCDMA = 80% market share will fall apart as Korea leverages their expertise in CDMA2000 to gain early market share of CDMA2000 in China.
Given the country's low per-capita income, I think it's safe to say that China's a very cost-sensitive market. If Unicom can roll out cdma2000 12 months or so before China Telecom rolls out W-CDMA, the additional capacity on its networks could allow them to significantly undercut its competition. Given China's relatively weak land-line infrastructure, cdma2000 could also be used as a viable last-mile internet solution.
Then again, maybe the cost reductions won't take place. Unicom's going to have to build an entire IS-95 infrastructure from scratch, and will have to deeply subsidize handsets in order to get existing GSM subscribers to switch over. It won't be cheap. Also, China Telecom will most likely have superior handsets to offer to its customers, especially if the Koreans stick with W-CDMA and force Samsung to devote the bulk of its handset design resources to the W-CDMA market.
Last week, Gilder said that HDR would have several announcments regarding incremental speed improvements. Voila, the very next day Samsung says they can take CDMA2000 via HDR to 5 MBPS next year. WOW!! Was that prescient or what?? More importantly, he cautioned that QCOM would be leading the standards process. This guy has an awful lot of credibility, so do not dismiss this potential for the collapse of the NOK, NTT, ERICY triumverate in Asia.
Gilder seems fairly good at getting information that the rest of us don't have. I remember the uproar he created when he first released the news that Sycamore and Corvis were in the process of becoming Avanex customers, so I guess the HDR announcement can't be looked at as a surprise; but in general, I've really lost a lot of respect that I once had for Gilder, something that's the result of a number of calls he's made, ranging from his Terayon over Broadcom, Lucent over Nortel, Mirror Image over Akamai, and the best one of his all, his trumpeting of Procom, with its so-called NAS devices that an 8th-grader could build, over Network Appliance. Again and again, Gilder's obsession with technological paradigms instead of market dynamics and business fundamentals has clouded his vision, and thus I'd take his predictions with a grain of salt (OT: it was interesting how he didn't directly go on record saying that W-CDMA won't be implemented in Europe, but instead chose to quote a non-name consulting group).
There is so much behind the scenes action that the plot is absolutely amazing. It is Shakespearian drama at it's best.
I've gotta agree with you here. That's why I love discussing wireles: so much is still up in the air, not just in terms of standards, but also in terms of products, services, technological developments, etc. In comparision, industries such as enterprise storage and optical networking operate like clockwork.
Will the Euro's continue to compound mistakes and go with DS CDMA?? Probably, but the Asians (especially the Chinese) have a limited amount of financial assets that could be wasted on backwater CDMA systems. I doubt that they will waste money on GSM upgrades developed in the 70's that were not designed for voice, data, video, audio, GPS, etc...
Provided that W-CDMA rolls out on time in 2002, it seems like the "financially strapped" Asian GSM operators would be better off going with W-CDMA so as to not scrap everything. What's interesting is the decisions that companies such as Telstra and Hutchinson, owning both CDMA and GSM networks, will make.
I guess it is not coincidental that the Chinese are warming up to CDMA again as the Senate nears a final vote on PNTR status for China.
In the end, it seems painstakingly obvious that Unicom's choice is more the result of political pressure than anything else. I suppose you could argue that this isn't fair, but then again, neither was the EC's mandate for GSM. This is quite an odd industry, one where decisions with far-reaching, multi-billion dollar consequences aren't always, the result of the work of engineers, the decisions of mindless bureaucrats, the analyses of corporate executives, or the preferences of consumers, but rather a mix of of these factions, all of which adds to the general frenzy and absurdity. Joseph Heller could've written one hell of a book on this industry.
Eric |
