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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EJhonsa who wrote (2826)	9/6/2000 12:37:19 PM
From: Keith Feral	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197326

I guess the main point I'm trying to make is that the battle between CDMA200 and WCDMA does not start and stop with QCOM vs the world. There are many other interests that are supporting equal market access for CDMA2000 and WCDMA in Asia. If WCDMA were to dominate Korea, it would be an economic disaster for Korea, not QCOM. IF WCDMA develops a market lead in Japan, CDMA2000 develops a market lead in Korea, then WCDMA and CDMA2000 will be deployed more evenly in China. This would foster the kind of competition that China and Asia need. I think that people overestimate the so called political pressure on Unicom. I think the pressure to downplay CDMA during the roadshow was in the best interests of the company. It would not make sense for a GSM company to tell the financial community about their plans to use the money they were being given to go out and build a rival technology (I'll bet more than a few of the investors were GSM related companies.) If I were Unicom mgmt, I would have stayed mum on CDMA plans in the FUTURE. Since Korea and Japan both have CDMA networks, neither country has to start CDMA projects from scratch. The companies that control CDMA in each country has a huge economic advantage and incentive to go with CDMA2000. I can't recall the exact number, but DDI said they saved something like 10 billion yen by going with CDMA2000 rather than WCDMA. This is a huge number. Since there are no companies that currently make WCDMA handsets, it's going to take a lot of time and money to convince Asian companies to replace their CDMA2000 handset capacity with WCDMA capacity. In the end, I see Japan trying to build a sphere of influence in WCDMA (thanks to DoCoMO) and CDMA2000. In Korea, there is no rational expectation for entire telecom industry to undergo an unnecessary swich from CDMA2000 equipment to WCDMA equipment. I would point out that industry and government work more closely in Asia than they do in the US. Since QCOM has no downside in either case, I am indifferent to the technology decisions made in Korea. (I certainly do not believe the rubbish printed by the AWSJ suggesting that QCOM will profit less from WCDMA.) Hence, I trust that Korea will go with the superior technology at the lowest cost to the system operators. How long will it take people to realize that NTT & their Euro buddies are crying wolf because they are the only ones stuck with the high costs of new spectrum for CDMA and the replacement of all of their air interface equipment from GSM to DS CDMA equipment? They want to spread their pain to as many other markets as possible to save face. The suspense in Korea is going to remain until the final decisions are made at the end of this month. However, it would be unimaginable for Korea to scrap it's current lead in CDMA replace their wireless networks with an unproven technology that is far less efficient.