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To: Rajala who wrote (90770)12/26/2000 11:45:50 AM
From: Kent Rattey  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 152472
 
Silly man,
You have never explained why the CEO of Nextel has "given up on EDGE", and is considering other technology including 1X.

AT&T, now there's a great example of some advanced technology... In the industry, they are known for their hodge podge networks. Ask someone from Global Services what technologies they use, and they will tell you it depends on the country. Pretty soon, their market cap and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee.

What else you got for us today?
Kent



To: Rajala who wrote (90770)12/26/2000 2:25:30 PM
From: EJhonsa  Respond to of 152472
 
The silly season is not over, clearly.

It never is, at this board :-). However, I do disagree with a couple of your comments:

So you consider EDGE irrelevant. Hmmm. That is advisable if you want to keep considering CDMA2000 as a 3G system, as EDGE beats it´s speed by a factor of more than 2. And EDGE is a mere 2.5G.

Getting 384k out of EDGE would require 8 GSM voice channels to be taken up, all in existing spectrum. I doubt that'll come across as a sound economic proposition for carriers with IMT-2000 (e.g. good for W-CDMA) spectrum to work with. Furthermore, EDGE, unlike GPRS, requires new base station hardware, and using it at high speeds leads for significant amounts of time leads to ridiculous levels of power consumption. Unfortunately, battery-related technologies aren't advancing anywhere as fast as processing-related technologies, and this will have to be taken into account. Given all these factors, it's no surprise that, although most of them are planning major GPRS rollouts, very few GSM operators have committed to EDGE.

>carriers want to go with the dominant system. Choices
>like ATT for
>GPRS/W-CDMA and Korean carriers for W-CDMA are seen as GSM
>"winning" the 3G race and Q losing.

Pretty hard to see it any other way.


They're definitely wins for the GSM camp, not sure if they mean that Qualcomm loses out completely though. Look at it this way: thanks to AWE's switch, a large % of the TDMA camp will now eventually be upgrading a CDMA variant, and thus purchasing equipment and handsets that'll generate royalties for Qualcomm.

Another interesting twist here. Who on earth would like to switch GSM to the mother of all betamax systems, cdma2000? I think this is a freudian slip, the statement should read: "Changing the GSM to Globalstar system is no easier/cheaper than change from GSM to cdma2000".

Betamax might be a bit strong. They got wiped out completely, after all. Apple sounds more like it. One point I'd like to make here is that a cdma2000 overlay can take place on an existing GSM-MAP core. Still, I agree that, unless there's some huge delays related to the development of W-CDMA, a GSM carrier would have trouble justifying a move to cdma2000 given the network effects that have lined up in favor of the former.

2) WCDMA is evolution from GSM. The path, in case someone is interested, is GSM-HSCSD-GPRS-EDGE-WCDMA.

We'll see how this holds up. HSCSD has already been given a cold reception within the GSM camp, even though, like GPRS, it only requires software upgrades to take place for existing GSM base stations. I'm sure the fact that GPRS was set to appear on the horizon in the near future played a major role in the upgrade decisions of GSM operators who contemplated HSCSD deployments a year or so ago. When taking this into account, given that W-CDMA should become availabl around the same time, it's difficult to be very optimistic about the long-term potential of EDGE (which does require base station hardware upgrades), at least among GSM carriers with new spectrum to work with.

Eric