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

To: foundation who wrote (26293)	8/31/2002 9:21:47 AM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 196393

Ben - My guess is that you will know that the standard is 'only' a year or two away from completion when you find CRs coming in as a result of one vendor testing their handset against another vendors basestation. Because until that happens there is literally no practical way to ensure that a set of specifications that is in the 10's of thousands of pages is complete. Do you know if the 3GPP vendors are even planning to test their pieces of equipment against each other? Given my engineering experience with some of these vendors I would bet that they aren't planning any such rigorous testing and it will only happen after two different networks roll out and they 'discover' that roaming is not possible. Given that I would predict that WCDMA will not be commercially or technically viable for at least another 2 to 3 years. And that is probably optimistic since it assumes that the vendors can actually resolve the technical incompatibility issues without getting political. Thanks for tracking and posting all this spec stuff and thereby prodding me to think about this another way - one in which I have first hand seen the lack of technical rigor in some of the European telecom companies. Clark

To: foundation who wrote (26293)	8/31/2002 12:16:16 PM
From: jackmore	Respond to of 196393

>>The implication is that each vendor is interpreting the standard differently or testing their base station to a different version of Release ’99.<< >>once the carriers upgrade their RAN and Core to Release 4, the already distributed Release ’99 3G handsets may not work properly, if at all.<< >>handoff problems will continue to loom well beyond 2002 due to the technical challenges of handing off between different technologies, not to mention the work remaining to develop a complete set of test scripts to ensure vendor and network interoperability.<< >>major OEMs are proposing vastly different network architecture solutions to implement the same release<< ========= What a mess. It would appear that WCDMA world-roaming is little more than a pipe dream. Now let's review: We already knew that WCDMA is late to market, that it doesn't work, and that it costs more. Now it's much touted roaming advantage is looking like bunk. What's left? Oh, right, the economies of scale. That should carry the day. Not even IJ can untangle this one. Q would be lucky to ever get their WCDMA MSM to work across multiple networks. It is looking more and more like the choices are: GSM1X, nothing, or pour more money down a rat hole.