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Technology Stocks : CDMA, Qualcomm, [Hong Kong, Korea, LA] THE MARKET TEST! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric L who wrote (1765)	12/15/2006 12:42:44 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 1819

Eric, my experience of the oil industry was that standards were a huge and wasteful jamboree. I personally killed one, a re-refined oil standard in New Zealand. Unfortunately, the NZ government took over the standard for petrol and diesel sold in NZ so what was agreed by 4 oil company Technical Services Managers in minutes, takes weeks, months or years of political carnage and bureaucracy to achieve [if we are lucky and they don't decide something dopey]. I understand and have participated in some "standards setting" - the fuel quality for Europe etc. And because oil companies often buy from each other, one wants to have fungible products to some extent. And because it's uneconomic to have 10 fuels for 100 different car designs, the car and fuel industries need to get some agreement on what should be available on forecourts. I personally also killed the Eurograde 95 nonsense. That was the Kremlin central planning solution. I thought a bit of variation would be economic and more profitable. A high-priced 98 octane for people with BMWs and Ferraris who want to roar down autobahns at 240 kph and accelerate up hills, around curves at 8000 rpm and 0.8g or something and a low-margin 91 octane for Mrs Smith to toddle down the road to Tesco for a few groceries. Eurograde 95 could be a middle of the road product for middle of the road people. The European government were also pushing for a single standardized diesel fuel. Which was a dopey idea too. A diesel commuter in Hamburg in winter needs a very different diesel fuel from a heavy truck running day and night going from Turkey to Spain. The commuter needs a high cetane number, low asphaltene, low sulphur, clean-burning, low wax diesel fuel and price doesn't matter much. The heavy truck can burn the rubbish, and pure sulphur would be fine as a fuel, wax would be great, heavy ends wouldn't matter, a few particulates in the countryside are neither here nor there. Okay, that's a bit more of a riff on fuel than you need - I got carried away. When QCOM has licensed their patents, they lose control of what is done with them, so Nokia for example could do anything it likes. Come to think of it, I know there was dispute about frequencies in which Koreans could use QCOM patents. But in general, if the licence is open for Nokia, for example, to do what they like with them, then Nokia can do all the fancy stuff you mentioned and if they can find enough commonality with others, then it becomes a mini standard competing with other mini standards. Like lots of different electricity plugs - a pain in the neck really if there's no advantage of one design over another. So far, the GSM standard has been vastly successful and the "lock them up" mentality of the CDMA world a relative failure. A single source supplier is fine. One can't demand multiple sources of Windows XP. I'm happy with my single source. If the price is right, people can cheerfully use it. If the single-source supplier gets greedy, they'll kill their goose which lays the golden eggs. QCOM isn't a single source anyway - others just couldn't do it well enough and cheap enough. That's different from a single source. There are licensees all over the place for everything. QCOM is single source ASIC, software and phone supplier for Globalstar and I've just bought a Tonka-Truckload of GSAT [$12.83 a couple of days ago]. If they get greedy, Globalstar will sell fewer handsets and QCOM's income will fall. As is starting to show, the W-CDMA jamboree is getting expensive - they all want a piece of it and royalties are high. W-CDMA has been going nowhere for half a decade. It's only the huge GSM base which has enabled it to compete. Note what is happening in Japan. The "proprietary" standard is chewing up D'oh!CoMo's W-CDMA. Note that in NZ, Telecom's CDMA2000 is hacking at Vodafone's glorious W-CDMA, which is a real turnaround for Telecom after a decade of losing ground to Vodafone. Where there is real competition, CDMA2000 is doing just fine. In Europe, where the Euroserfs are in thrall to the GSM Guild and they can buy 3GSM or walk, 3GSM has laboured. Mqurice

To: Eric L who wrote (1765)	3/30/2009 8:57:40 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 1819

Much of the discussion surrounding IPR used in standards and the calling of IP as 'proprietary' hinges on nature of standards developments, an artificial override of basic patent rights. Before anyone gets too dissecting of what is 'proprietary' and what is IPR used in standards, you should take a step back to analyze the body of patents and understand the body of agreements and legal disputes and settlements: Most of Qualcomm's IPR settlements, regime of agreements, sustained position in the industry and continued strong revenues derives from the fundamental rather than the "essential to the standard" nature of Qs core patents. Moving forward, the industry is shifting to wireless interface technologies based on MIMO-OFDMA technologies, smart distributed wireless network and virtualization, and convergence including graphics, and distributed processing. These converged areas already have had an impact on Q via Broadcom vs. Qualcomm. And this is part of the shift of mobile wireless to the ICT unified structure. Q both broadens the scope of their endeavors and meets increased competition in an environment in which they lose control of their fundamental IPR position. - Robert Syputa

To: Eric L who wrote (1765)	3/30/2009 9:16:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1819

Much of the discussion surrounding IPR used in standards and the calling of IP as 'proprietary' hinges on nature of standards developments, an artificial override of basic patent rights. Before anyone gets too dissecting of what is 'proprietary' and what is IPR used in standards, you should take a step back to analyze the body of patents and understand the body of agreements and legal disputes and settlements: Most of Qualcomm's IPR settlements, regime of agreements, sustained position in the industry and continued strong revenues derives from the fundamental rather than the "essential to the standard" nature of Qs core patents. Moving forward, the industry is shifting to wireless interface technologies based on MIMO-OFDMA technologies, smart distributed wireless network and virtualization, and convergence including graphics, and distributed processing. These converged areas already have had an impact on Q via Broadcom vs. Qualcomm. And this is part of the shift of mobile wireless to the ICT unified structure. Q both broadens the scope of their endeavors and meets increased competition in an environment in which they lose control of their fundamental IPR position. - Robert Syputa