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

To: Jim Mullens who wrote (32729)	2/21/2003 8:41:25 PM
From: foundation	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 196848

Jim - no............. EDGE is a confession. The major 3GSM vendors have a fortune invested in wCDMA research, and that is where they had seen their future - a future which is now, uncomfortably, the present. EDGE is a confession that - quite aside from the Cannes rhetoric - wCDMA is not near ready, and that it's capacity/coverage characteristics render it impractical. EDGE is a confession that GPRS is a hollow shell of its intended self, and it's ironic that even EDGE does not live up to original GPRS performance promises. wCDMA is stalling in Europe, and the failure of Hutchison "3" may well kill wCDMA CAPEX in Europe. How will our 3GSM vendor friends make a buck? And Europe might well go with EDGE provided it worked and required no new infra hardware... but if it works it won't be this year, and the new hardware would be required for aged, legacy networks in Europe. But perhaps the biggest roadblock would be the bankers and the write-downs... as an interim EDGE upgrade step (EDGE before wCDMA versus EDGE after and supplementing wCDMA) would completely destroy the wCDMA expectation bubble. The prospect of that financial destruction alone might be more than sufficient to dissuade the big carriers... So what are the carriers to do? [ If they can't manage to do better than 4M GPRS data subscribers, it won't matter. ] What would the bankers swallow? Pissing away more bucks on still speculative GSM related upgrades? Upgrades that - if 3G ever flourishes - are down the toilet on antiquated systems? For me, this is the only framework where Q's very long-shot "1x/do along side wCDMA" marketing in Europe makes sense. With wCDMA on the ropes, would the bankers prefer spending on advanced GSM1x 3G that could integrate with wCDMA in future? Would bankers prefer that CAPEX not be tossed down a GSM rabbit hole?