EricL, that Message 15105100 was an excellent summary of 3G, cdma2000 and W-CDMA and why selections are being made as they are. I don't think I saw that, concealed over in G&K.
I was thinking more of the technical merits of W-CDMA over cdma2000, which, in the absence of network effects, protective laws, economies of scale etc, determine the successful technology. On the other hand, all the technical merit seems to lie with cdma2000 with the most important, capacity and quickly to market being cdma2000 advantages. Those translate into cost advantages. See a few posts back for the details [number 7000, thanks Kayaker] Message 15299888
There is also a more open standard with cdma2000 because anyone can use it, just as they can W-CDMA provided they comply with licensing terms, but they don't get bound up in a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense from the UMTS suffocation committees. In my oil industry days, there were huge standards jamborees which rolled on for days and weeks. There was one underway in New Zealand for re-refined lubricants. I happened to be in a position to dump it [it had been gathering momentum and was down to the details on specifications].
There is something weird about people and managers of companies that they avoid competition and prefer to be safely in a bureaucratic crowd. I guess they don't come to grief if they are safely in a crowd. Good, happy, democratic, lowest common denominator stuff.
Well, I prefer red-blooded competition and may the best standard win. If some wish to spend the best part of a decade waffling around in a 3G committee, squabbling over shares of IPR, that's up to them. I prefer the clean sweep of brilliant creative people who come up with cdma2000 and go out there and win with customers. Of course governments do NOT like that approach, so cdma2000 is banned from all sorts of places [such as Europe]. Perhaps George Bush and his Free Marketeers will tell the Six Musketeers to take a running jump. [I'm cynical about that and we'll see with lamb imports just how Free Marketeer the USA becomes - at the moment, they have been judged as illegally breaching WTO rules on lamb trading].
There is some unquantified theoretical advantage in underground services for W-CDMA [though I don't see why cdma2000 can't work as well in such locations]. Other than that, the merits seem to lie with cdma2000.
The dominant reason for the slow [if we call 70 million subscribers in 4 years slow] growth of CDMA is that it was specifically excluded from Europe and China. Those are political, not economic or technological or rational reasons. They are the result of centrally-planned economies with 5 year plans, just like the good old USSR and the same outcome will result to the extent that central planning is done. The USA is also full of central planning through FCC rules and restrictions on who can provide what services. Telecommunications around the world are very far from a free market. So it's not surprising that cdmaOne and cdma2000 have a tough job despite major technical advantages. In the USA, people even had to pass a pigment test and gonad or chromosome check before bidding in the C-Block auction...weird! The government officials must be some kind of pervert.
The main advantages for W-CDMA seem to be government support, NTT leveraging their Japanese telecom monopoly [now huge market share rather than outright monopoly] by buying support for their W-CDMA technology - yes, money talks but prostitutes are notoriously unfaithful, GSM Guild members promoting W-CDMA as a means to prolong and maintain their GSM revenues without a care for subscribers' interests [Nokia has a vast revenue stream to promote W-CDMA; cdma2000 would bring an early end to their GSM handset sales and bring in a lot more competition too].
Once that political unholy alliance gained momentum, economies of scale started to take effect and until spectrum is really squeezed, W-CDMA will be [perhaps] cheaper per erlang and bushell than cdma2000 [especially with a bit of subsidy by Nokia and Ericy from their large GSM streams to ensure W-CDMA gets traction].
Then there is the network effect - roaming is still problematic and will be for a few years yet, so service providers don't want to be offering a Mickey Mouse minimal standard which nobody uses. They'd rather go down with the herd than by themselves. If W-CDMA is delayed, that's okay because everyone else is delayed too. If it's more expensive, well, it's only 5% more expensive and only 30% less efficient in spectrum and everyone is in the same boat so what the hell.
If everyone is using W-CDMA, there will be a wider range of devices at lower costs. Heck, even the infrastructure might be cheaper due to competition and lower margins in W-CDMA than cdma2000. So, who wants to stand alone and back the little guy, even if it is a bit better in some ways?
However, there is a small matter of time to market and cdma2000 technological advantages, such as 1xEV, radioOne and multimode ASICs [which will void the roaming advantage of W-CDMA]. Last one in could miss out in a big way.
Right now, there is concern that the 3G market 'isn't there'. Well, we'll soon see as early, faster, Internet services on better devices come on stream. I think the market will be proven to be the biggest thing in human history [actually, in biological history, but that's another story]. When [if, if you prefer] the market is proven, there will be a stampede to make the Klondike gold rush and Spindletop oil mania look like children's picnics.
Standards committees will be bulldozed out of the way and a wild free-for-all of competing pandemonium for a piece of the action will ensue. Telling people to just wait a couple more years for the dots and crosses on the 3GPP [initial phase] UMTS SETI VW-40 ITU IMT-2000 committee papers to be completed and then they'll be able to use a crusty inefficient government-approved standard, which costs more and works like a Russian tractor, won't be a good idea. Customers are notorious for buying into the action. Check out i-mode, SMS and upmarket Nokia handsets for hints of what drives people.
I was chatting to a salesman in a Telecom mobile shop in a mall yesterday. They are trying to hold the line against Vodafone and GSM [unsuccessfully] while they wait for cdma to come on stream. He said father, daughter, wife arrive to see about getting said teenage daughter a phone. There is a sociological drama then takes place. The father maintains the NZ$99 [US$45] prepay clunker phone is perfect, especially as it is the first phone and he really [to himself] feels intruded on by the whole mobile world. The daughter refuses to consider it and prefers to have NO phone. The mother tries to drag the father into the realm of humanity, trying to explain why the NZ$400 model is really reasonable. The father's sense of manhood and place in the world is under serious threat and he knows it. He also knows he is in a losing position. Eventually, after the full psychodrama of family madness is played out, the daughter gets the phone or divorce and an early leaving of home ensue. Violence no doubt plays a part in the extreme cases.
If the father shows up by himself to get said daughter a phone, he of course chooses the black prepay clunker. The man at the shop gently tries to reason with him, offering the concept that perhaps he would like to just run it by the daughter to get her reaction before committing himself, but of course the father is quite right and of course the phone is available right now if he wishes to go through with the purchase. The father detects this faint hint that he is derailed and deranged and offers his opinion on the ancestors of the said salesman, who just wants to sell a few phones and have a happy life.
We are witnessing a global sociological phenomenon in the mobile world. I don't have hyperbole enough to explain it. Suffice to say that it is the biggest thing to happen on the planet since it cooled into a watery sphere. It might be the biggest thing which has happened in the whole universe since we still don't know that there are others 'out there'. That's understating the case really. We need to get metaphysical to really describe what's happening.
Now, maybe the UMTS crowd are up to that challenge and can handle it, but I doubt it.
Imagine the father telling his teenage daughter to just wait a few years, until she grows up...then she can have UMTS-approved W-CDMA... I think he would know better. Two years to a teenage female is the equivalent of 3 ice-ages. She will think her father is a recycled mastadon escaped from the last freeze-up.
Mqurice |
