Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: engineer who wrote (4280)	11/4/2000 8:20:25 AM
From: limtex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197001

eng - re-listening to IJ on the cc it it is becoming even clearer that there is a huge and widening gap between what we keep hearing (hearing mind you but not seeing) about DoCoMo and a couple of others ( Singapore comes to mind) about W-CDMA on the one hand and what IJ ( and many of our knowledgeable posters) say on the other hand. I am begining to think that the W-CDMA gang are going to resolve this as one of the questioners very aptly put it. He asked whether in effect the technology advantages were outweighed by very smart marketing. It seems to me that it boils down to this:- 1. W-CDMA doesn't exist today in a working commercially deployable state. Its current development may be even more behind than that. 2. There is no license currently in place to allow anyone to use the Qs CDMA IP in a WCDMA system. Dr J said that he hoped that this would be sorted out amicably. I think he said hoped. 3. In mainland GSM territory of Europe GPRS is being deployed of for instance I think that BT Cellnet in Gt Britain is deploying it. This will be marketed to people as something fantastic. The customers in Europe are totally GSM and for the most part roam between one coutry and another seemlessly. Once in a roaming territory they get gouged per minute thats one of the big reasons for all this instistence in Korea for W-CDMA ie a piece of the GSM roaming pie. They will be old that they have the most up to date system in the World which puts the Internet in your handset. Never mind that it is total nonsense and that Korea is now the most advanced country in the world for mobile telephony. The Europeans would laugh if you told them that. Believe me eng, they would think you had gone stark raving mad if you told them that Korea was ahead of Europe in mobile telephony. So they will never know what they are missing and the GSM bacon will be saved by smart marketing as the questioner suggested. What did Dr Goebbels say.."the bigger the lie the more people will believe it". Best regards, L

To: engineer who wrote (4280)	11/4/2000 11:58:58 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 197001

Unfortunately, outside of yourself, Mightylakers, and Microe (ok there are a couple of others Clark, Molloy etc.).....ALL of us are simply making inferences based on published reports. As to the roll-out of W-CDMA....the real question is if their are handset ASIC's ready to go. It seems fairly certain that the infrastructure portion will be ready to go. BTW....an analyst almost got it right when he asked what Qualcomm would do if Nokia shipped 3G equipment. They should have used NEC instead. nec.co.jp Ericsson also stated that they expect to begin shipping infrastructure by the end of the year. As to handset ASIC's....here's a post by Mika which seems to claim that trials were underway with W-CDMA handsets (not moving vans) a year ago. Message 13469801 If the above post is correct, then it fits your time-line almost perfectly. If NEC had a working prototype handset in Oct '99 then it will be 20 months to May '01. Since NEC/Ericsson both are supposedly installing W-CDMA equipment right now, it seems a safe assumption that the next 7 months are going to be spent attempting to test the network under real-world conditions. None of this means that I am absolutely correct that NTT will roll-out a system in May '01. It seems to me that the system will likely be labeled "commercial" but the first couple of months will be a trial system under full-load. Of course, all of the above are simply inferences.... Slacker

To: engineer who wrote (4280)	11/4/2000 2:02:50 PM
From: EJhonsa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197001

Actually, in a reply I wrote to you a couple of days ago (http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=14695691), I mentioned that the speed at which the MSM5000 rolled out might be attributable to the fact that it's a backwards-compatible upgrade solution; but since I didn't get any responses related to this... So, assuming that 18 months are needed for a chip, that things could be rushed a little given the circumstances, and that DoCoMo might have some minor delays, a W-CDMA chip, with suppoting system software, still would have to have been developed by the beginning of this year. slacker already brought up the fact that NEC most like has accomplished this...and there's a good chance that they're not the only ones. A little while ago, there was some controversy regarding the Yozan/Phillips alliance, and how its W-CDMA ASIC plans were a bit late to market, and left much to be desired on a technical level. However, the truth about Yozan is that the Japanese manufacturers seem to care very little for it. For example, read the last line in this well-read EE Times article: eetimes.com "All major cellular phone vendors here (in Japan) doing wideband CDMA are developing their own ASICs," Helton said. Or consider this piece about Yozan: Message 14537527 "We expect to be able to sell the solution package (mother machine) to three foreign companies this fiscal year" ending March 2001, Takatori said. "If our support capability allows, we want to sell the product to two more customers in the year." Yozan is trying to sell the product to companies with which it doesn't have overlapping businesses, he added....Takatori said the company will be as picky about choosing its clients for chips as it is for its solution package products. With this kept in mind, as well as Siemens' alliance with Toshiba (in which Toshiba will provide the W-CDMA ASICs) in spite of Infineon's announcement, Vodaphone's talks with Panasonic, and the fact that nearly all of the Japanese manufacturers have had very close ties to DoCoMo for quite a while, there seems to be a very good chance that NEC isn't the only one that's had a W-CDMA ASIC out for a while. BTW, criticize my lack of a technical background if you want (something that I've never denied), but, on the same token, it's startling to me how an industry insider such as yourself can be so ignorant about what your fellow wireless engineers around the world have been working on for so long with regards to W-CDMA, ignorant to the level that major developments which took place a weeks, months, or even years ago have to be broken to you over an internet message board by people who don't work within the industry; but I suppose that's alright. After all, since you weren't let in on all of these developments, you're only able to get this information from the same sources as the rest of us, so you're bound to make a few mistakes, right? Eric PS - Jon, I'd take those W-CDMA capacity estimates with a grain of salt. Even Gilder, who generally bashed W-CDMA in a report a couple of months ago, admitted that, although W-CDMA has a number of weaknesses wrt processing and battery requirements, the use of a direct spread should allow for 6% or so higher capacity than cdma2000.