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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mightylakers who wrote (110864)	1/13/2002 10:51:55 PM
From: gc	Respond to of 152472

Wrong! sell pretzel manufacturers.

To: mightylakers who wrote (110864)	1/14/2002 12:35:05 AM
From: Gary L. Kepler	Respond to of 152472

In case anyone missed this Leap discussion: Mark Kelly CTO Leap Wireless Q. How will Leap expect to grow in the next year? A. Because we don't need to interconnect to a larger network for roaming, we can roll out our networks like IHOPs. We don't need a nationwide spectrum license, just another market and to build out. Our model is standalone, but of course we benefit from economies of scale when we make handsets available. We'll have more than 1 million subscribers in 35 markets by year-end. Q. As a CDMA-based wireless provider, what will impact your network? A. Three things will make current capacity per unit of bandwidth and spectral efficiency go up 3X: 1XRTT, selectable mode vocoders and smart antennas. Qualcomm's new handset technology, for example, puts receive diversity in the handset. Rayleigh fading at 1900 MHz is at about 6 inches apart. If you can separate even half of that, you pick up 3 to 6 db in performance. Q. Where is Leap in terms of 3G migration? A. By using Lucent ModCells, we can easily upgrade to 3G via new software and 1XRTT channel cards, which will double our voice capacity from 19 up to a 30-factor per-frequency level. This requires 1XRTT-based handsets, which we'll put on the market in 2002. In most markets, we will redeploy 95-A cards in areas where there's not much capacity need. We already have a technology evaluation market trial underway for 1XRTT. Q. How do you view alternative air interfaces? A. Anytime you change the air interface, you struggle. Leap doesn't have enough customers to make a wholesale change. To that end, we want equipment with the lowest-cost and highest reliability and something fairly along the learning curve in terms of technology and production. If GSM could handle more capacity economically, it might be a better solution, because it is five years farther along the curve. Some of these solutions are very novel, but it would be irresponsible of me to recommend something else unless it's 10X better. Could it evolve? It possibly could in another band, and if there are applications that can't be met by current air interface technology. Most likely, some intellectual property would get woven into an existing standard. Both Tantivy and LinkAir are members of the TIA and the CDMA development group. Q. Given the expense of new cell sites, what's your take on smart antennas? A. I consider smart antennas wireless' final frontier. If you look at modulation and coding, 1XRTT has gone as far as it can go, and I can't see huge evolutions unless you go to higher order modulation. A selectable mode vocoder will bring voice coding to its limit from 8 kbps down to 4 kbps. If voice is compressed as much as possible, and modulations are the highest order needed to make a phone call, what's left? The dumb antenna. Because capital efficiency is key, a smart antenna system should be able to maximize the margin we get for every bit. Arraycomm, Metawave and Alestra are all doing the right thing by competing for that final frontier. Q. What impact will IP have on wireless? A. The logical question is why not just have it all-IP? 1XEVDO (1 X Evolution Data Only) will be end-to-end IP. With all these voice evolutions, there's inefficiency in IP for voice. Someone estimated that using two time slots in GPRS-worth of capacity to put a voice call up causes twice as many bits to go over the air to support a conversation. With IP, you have a whole order of magnitude in terms of data speeds on the landline as opposed to mobile. If we keep increasing the capacity, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) will get in there, but I don't see it happening in the near term. -Sean Buckley Message 16867929