C2, thanks for some explanations about the arcane world of cyberphone acronyms, the relationship of Nokia and QUALCOMM and what might happen to royalties. As you say, Holy Wars II is on in a big way.
As you know, I have predicted an all-out litigious anti-trust/anti-monopoly/anti-bundling/anti-anti-competitive practises attack on QCOM for about a decade with monopolistic bundling alleged by the drooling looters hoping to enjoy a free lunch and grab other people's property. Grabbing others' lunches is the oldest trick in the book, common in school yards, going all the way back to our chimpoid antecedents. So I'm not at all surprised.
There has been such a long and accepted practise of QCOM receiving 5% royalties that it's pretty well accepted that 5% is the minimum CDMA is worth, even without the added merits of mobile cyberspace added on. When GSM's 16% royalties are considered, 5% for something which does the same job 10 times as efficiently, maybe more, is a bargain. [That is, squeezing pixels, bits and bytes through spectrum at very low $ per pixel/bit/byte]
The USA is the primary defender of QCOM's intellectual property and while the USA is having a spot of trouble with the civil insurrection in Iraq, the USA is still armed to the teeth with hydrogen bombs, Predators, aircraft carriers, B52s, cruise missiles, MIRVs and any number of tools of destruction which can fly right in a nominated window. Not to mention the biggest GDP on Earth and about the biggest GDP per capita on Earth [minor countries notwithstanding]. The USA is in a position to defend QCOM's property and cash flows and because of the enormous tax flows from QCOM and associated properties, [Motorola et al, not to mention intellectual properties in general such as MSFT] to the Pentagon [via the tax department], has got incentive to do so.
Any country planning an outright theft is likely to get some argument. The Europeans for example are getting some discussion over their theft from Microsoft - some woman in a court somewhere told MSFT to pay $1bn or thereabouts for failing to comply with some absurd order because MSFT dared to bundle their products or sell them at a higher price than she liked or some such. DOHA is dead. I'd like to see a good old-fashioned trade war, with tariffs put on various things. No quotas. Just tariffs. Raise taxes at the borders, taxing foreigners, not taxing the population of the country. The primary purpose of a government is to define and defend borders and that's where the taxation to perform that function should be made.
Instead of spending umpty $billions on war in OPEC countries, tax their products when they arrive in the USA and cut taxes to match inside the USA. Then, people would develop fuel cells, photovoltaics, methanol or ethanol from crops, efficient engines, smaller vehicles, electronic controls for traffic management and other things to cut energy costs.
But back to cyberspace Holy Wars II. Here's what I wrote:
<W-CDMA is absolutely not GSM. The air interface is the main issue in wireless [pretty much by definition as the rest is the wired part and can't be called wireless]. GSM back end hardware, and the fibre around the world, the switches and other icky electronic stuff to process what the CDMA part delivers is still "GSM" to a greater or lesser extent. But the air interface has no relationship whatsoever with GSM.
Calling it 3GSM or 3G does not mean that GSM gets nearer than the bottom of a base station. The heavy lifting in the 3GSM/UMTS/W-CDMA/3G wireless space is done by CDMA, which is QCOM technology. Phragmented photons are not particularly heavy, so it's more magical incantations in Fourier-land than industrial revolution donkey work being done.
The upshot of it is that you paid me royalties for your sale of gold. Would you like a shovel with your banking transaction? Selling shovels to gold miners has always been a profitable enterprise. Often more profitable than the miners' efforts.>
You thought the assertion that W-CDMA is not GSM is incorrect. I emphasized the air interface and the heavy lifting in electronic gizzardly to produce aethereal Fourier functions which QCOM technology performs. Of course there is lots more to W-CDMA than just the air interface and it is indeed built on a whole bunch of legacy GSM-world obsolete technology which has managed to hold onto life despite the arrival of the 21st century. Heck, in some countries they even still use miles, gallons, furlongs, ounces, pounds, pecks and bushels. Obsolete things can sometimes hang on for a long time because the cost of replacing the legacy things is just a bit too much so it's inflicted on the young of each generation who don't know to reject it out of hand because they are a blank slate. By the time they realize they were tricked, they are enmeshed in the system, committed to it and go with it. Look at me using unmetricated English. An absurd hybrid conglomeration of linguistic trash collected over the millennia. I have too much sunk into it to do much about it. So I moan about apostrophe's and continue to use it.
Anyway, so yes, there is plenty of GSM-world intellectual property inflicted on W-CDMA and yes, QCOM has to buy the rights to use it [or trade for the rights]. Even if W-CDMA was purely CDMA, because of the multimode world and integrated ASICs doing all tasks, and QCOM wanting to sell GSM ASICs and software so subscribers can roam from W-CDMA to GSM on one device, QCOM would be needing to enjoy rights to sell GSM-supporting equipment.
Unfortunately, the words CDMA, W-CDMA and GSM have been stretched and mangled in meaning to fit all sorts of things. 3GSM would, and was intended to, confuse most people into thinking it hasn't got much to do with CDMA at all and everything to do with GSM. Which would be very wrong. The intention of course was to avoid using the expression CDMA which is why 3GSM was invented and to continue with the GSM brand which was making umpty$billions for the GSM Guild.
But the TDMA/GSM/CDMA/OFDM/WIFI/WIMAX words are primarily referring to the technology of the air interface, not the back end stuff which gets the signals from cyberspace on the other side of the world to the radio device which does the antennae shaking which squirts photons out into the aether.
So, from a royalty point of view, you are quite right that W-CDMA has got a LOT to do with GSM, but from an air interface point of view, which is what I was referring to, it has nothing to do with time division multiple access technology of which GSM is but one version. In W-CDMA the aether is not cut up into tiny time slots in which signal is shoved through without contamination by other signals. The voices are delivered in cocktail conversation, many voices at once, with decription at the handset and base station to separate them.
My main point was that TJ has entered the realm of CDMA and paid for the privilege [bundled though his charge might have been with charges for his accommodation, food, or simply gifted by a friend who paid]. I have waited years for TJ to pay me. Maybe his payment wasn't as direct as coins in the slot of a CDMA device, but it was payment all the same. It will be even more satisfying when he finally realizes that he wants to buy an outright CDMA device [or OFDM]. But whether one owns a car or hires a taxi, one is still paying for a car. And whether he rents a device or buys one, it's no skin off my nose.
I prefer the idea of renting as owning things is a bit of a pain in the neck. But for most things, the balance of convenience is to own one's own device. Lowest common denominator issues, taxes and transaction costs make renting problematic. People who look after things pay for those who don't.
TJ is sure to buy. It's just a question of when. He is suffering inconvenience right now, but like the Neanderthal contemplating a calculator, doesn't know he needs it. Once he has used it for a while, he will consider it an essential ingredient to a civilized [and profitable] life. I'm patient.
Mqurice
PS: It's a long rant because I'm sitting comfy in Saint Quentin La Poterie, 4 km from cyberspace, with loads of time on my hands. I [and our now-adult offspring] will be able to regale grandchildren with stories about how cyberspace worked back in the day - like Model T Fords with gravel roads instead of hybrid SUV Lexus swishing down superhighways over the glorious Millau bridge at 140 km per hour. I'll deliver this in 3D to Uzes tomorrow perhaps and upload it into cyberspace [at great expense - 2 euro per hour, plus traveling costs, time etc]. This is so stone age. When HSDPA, Dorb and OFDM are swishing pixels through cyberspace at a sensible price, this will seem like 1915 in the automobile era, [European service providers are insanely greedy and it's not surprising mobile cyberspace is not selling well]. |
