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

To: propitious7 who wrote (16978)	11/30/2001 5:14:36 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 197208

propitious, << VOD - c'est la guerre ... I was an investor in QCOM >> So was I. So be I. The conversation I referred to took place at a sidewalk bistro in Versailles the week after Labor Day in 1999 where I dined with a VOD employee and one from FT. My companions had both seen activity in ETSI and 3GPP working groups. The 3 of us were attending a conference sponsored by the telecom division of a European IT company. Now if you think back to summer of 99, there was quite a bit of speculation on these Qualcomm boards that: 1. CDMA (voice and data) would replace the GPRS pocket bearer service in 2.5G GSM 2. VOD would choose cdma2000 as their 3G technology I had been pretty shocked earlier in the week to learn just how many GPRS systems were on order in Europe (and the US) that were not yet common knowledge. I had also sat through several presentations by carriers on their rollout plans for GPRS and eventual migration to WCDMA (spectrum auctions hadn't begun). Plans for implementation and migration were much more consecrative than the media has made out but still more aggressive than what we are seeing (as regards GPRS but not WCDMA which was being pencilled in as commercial trials in 2003 with full scale launches in 2004, given the reality of getting through standardization and into commercialization). As we sat down to our first glass of Merlot, I broached subject number one which led to number 2, and by the time we finished those subjects several bottles had been consumed and we hadn't yet ordered dinner. It was a pretty lively conversation and my companions were rather expressive. The long and short of it is that number 1 was at least considered for a (very) short period of time in 1998 at around the time GPRS 'R97' was published, but died quickly. Number 2 was never in the cards. This just their opinion of course but they had plenty of examples to back it up. In general, they felt it had to do with the way Qualcomm played (or refused to play) the open standards game, what was going on behind the scenes between the US and the EC, and the stance on the 5 principles that Qualcomm took in 1998. As the FT guy said in conclusion (before we got on to other things), "c'est fini ... c'est la guerre". Otherwise it was a great evening ... <g> - Eric -