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

To: Stock Farmer who wrote (129447)	6/1/2003 6:39:43 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

John, re <It gets smaller and lighter and cheaper and faster, until further evolution is irrelevant. At full investment rate, it moves by factor two every 18 months or so. Bet against that and you are bound to lose. Keep arguing about today if you like. But you are paying for a stock priced for performance a decade from now. If investment continues to pour into 4G technologies, then they will improve through four iterations of Moore's law. Factor 100 better than the best we can achieve today.> I've been betting with that since 1989 when I started looking for a company to do CDMA, which I didn't then know would be called CDMA, but would involve fast decoding at the handset, of jumbled phragmented photons. I first hunted down OFDM in the latish 1990s while on the lookout for competitors. You look at the same facts as me and come up with different conclusions. I have been wanting faster Moore's Law action to turbocharge CDMA technology and you seem to think the same process is bad for QUALCOMM. OFDM gives more efficient spectrum use in mobile cyberspace, but more for data than voice. The improvement in efficiency isn't great and the cost of spectrum per minute of voice is already so low with CDMA that it is more valuable to use more spectrum to improve voice quality [you'll recall that they were originally trying to do voice with 8 kbps and went to 13 kbps - almost doubling the spectrum gobbling process]. As the cost of electronic gizzards comes down, [by a large chunk with the radioOne step], it'll be economic to do a lot more with CDMA. Base stations can be packed in closer. The spectrum advantage of OFDM won't be a big deal. That's the same process by which GSM impressively held back the CDMA tide. They did more and more and squeezed more and more into their handsets and spectrum. They delayed CDMA's inroads by about 3 or 4 years. CDMA has a much bigger advantage over TDMA methods such as GSM than OFDM has over CDMA. It seems to me that as OFDM makes gains, [such as in 802.11b and 802.11g, or Flarion's technology], it'll be a matter of having both in a subscriber device. A little like we have both ears and eyes running in our own central processors. We even throw in touch and taste to widen our sensory experience and have no trouble fitting them into the same central processing bundle. While some blind or deaf people claim that they don't want to experience the other senses, preferring their world as it is, having lived their lives like that and knowing that adding the other sense can be very confusing and disorienting, [a bit like adding a $billion to a person's bank account can be very disruptive to their psychic well-being though it seems to be obvious that we all want a $billion - remember the Sudden Wealth Syndrome and the problems it brought, though the subsequent Sudden Poverty Syndrome was worse], most of would quite like to have eyes, ears, touch, taste, $1billion and why not throw in the 21st century ability to sense radio frequency too? I hope that rambling sentence isn't too long. By including radio frequency in GSM, OFDM, 802.11g, CDMA2000, WCDMA and maybe some other stuff too, we could have Google right there in our brains anytime, anywhere, and the ability to talk with anyone, anywhere. I'd like that. My investment in QUALCOMM is dependent on a rapid reduction in the cost of electronics and improved data delivery. The process can't go fast enough for me. It's been far too slow so far. I thought we'd be where we are years ago. Globalstar has totally failed - I thought we'd be about to launch the next constellation right now due to the first being full. Globalstar still has monster handsets running in your old-style GSM lab mode, with brick phones and battery drain with little capacity and limited coverage. Mqurice

To: Stock Farmer who wrote (129447)	6/4/2003 3:04:25 PM
From: Quincy	Respond to of 152472

In 1990, the first HDTV would not fit through the door of a typical US residence. While things have improved since 1991, its evolution has done little to speed up our migration off of NTSC or affect NTSC marketshare today. In the late 80's, NHK laboratories developed several important breakthroughs needed to deploy Japan's MUSE HDTV coverage for a 21Mhz-wide channel. No one could broadcast it like VHF or UHF. They had to distribute its programming through DSS sat dishes. NAB 1991, they portrayed the scenario of having a rotating dish on a limo to maintain reception and showed white papers on how to design condo complexes (skyscrapers) and freeway overpasses to minimize diffraction interference to maintain reception. Fortunately, that research turned into a very popular DSS TV service featuring 18" dishes. The US did not adopt NHK's HDTV system as it forced broadcasters to start over. Except that the FCC is trying to move current VHF broadcasters to UHF, the US-developed ATSC DTV system was designed to reuse a significant equipment investment in the transmitter and broadcast antenna plant and maintain the same channel spacing. Today, the debate is over the future of OFDM. Never mind you keep deploying it above 2ghz which will kill any dream of coverage matching cellular. OFDM requires comparably significant horsepower just to demodulate its link. GSM and CDMA are using the same technology to offer significant standby and talk times. Now for my favorite comparison: VHS vs. BETA. Beta lost on cost. Not on quality. With significantly more complex tape transport, Sony could have maintained marketshare at a lost. But, JVC's development of 2 hour tapes caused Beta to fade into history. OFDM might eventually lead on cost. But, its limited market appeal and coverage still gives incumbent 2G technologies the upper hand. While 4G offers advantages in data rates, present-day limits on cablemodem service fosters the belief nothing good comes from 20mb/sec links such as DDOS attacks and Spam floods. In fact, unless I need the latest MSFT patch blob, there really isn't anything wrong with 384k/128k DSL. Millions are still happy with dialup. "When things happen that seem to defy explanation, it is usually because the explainer doesn't comprehend what is going on." My residential DSL provider decided to concentrate on their T1 and server hosting, forcing me to visit the local public library for the next two weeks. People are looking at me as I sit here, wondering if I am another library-computer-haunting pedophile. I had hoped that a power-handset-app would foster the uptake of 1X-DO and impede the growth of AT&T, Tmobile, and Cingular. While I believe BREW is the coolest thing invented since Netscape and a whole lot faster than J2ME, GSM providers are still attracting customers by offering cheaper voice minutes. You don't need history to predict the future of 4G. I'm doing just fine with the present.