Our Own Maurice Winn on "Wireless Bill" Frezza and Techo Seduction ...
... on SI's original CDMA QUALCOMM board a long time contributor to our boards who now prefers to be called 'kech' followed a post by the long departed Chris Reeder (who I miss), and he wrote this note about a later Frezza article he'd just discovered ... probably either "CDMA / Blazing A Trail Of Broken Dreams" (April 15, 1996) or "Lucrative Digital Cellular Market Up For Grabs" (June 3, 1996). [see below]
>> To: Maurice Winn
From: Xxx Xxxx
Post 148
Friday, June 7, 1996
To all, Frezza strikes again in June 3 Communications Week. "Lucrative Digital Cellular Market Up for Grabs" Pretty similar to "emperor's clothes" article but this time he systematically debunks 2 of 3 advantages of CDMA and says the only one remaining is 6 times analog capacity for CDMA vs 3 times analog capacity for TDMA. He says voice quality, even with 13 kb vocoder is the same, and cell site coverage, originally thought to be 2 to 5 times the coverage area of TDMA or analog is now down to 1:1 at Trenton CDMA site. He says the reason AIRTOUCH had/ is having all the trouble in LA is that they "took this claim at face value" and "interference and power balancing" have turned it into an engineering nightmare. He claims that this reduction in coverage estimates will have a significant impact on the economics of CDMA. Any thoughts on these charges? I know Frezza is a consultant for Ericsson etc. and is likely to be looking for anything nasty he can find but on the other hand, maybe this thread on commercialization is still alive. Do we need to be vigilant about ongoing progress with CDMA not just with voice quality but also with coverage, power balancing, interference. Anybody hear of any progress on these issues in LA? ###
Maurice followed with this reply to Chris (and 'kech')...
>> To: Chris Reeder who wrote (147)
From: Maurice Winn
Sunday, Jun 9, 1996
Chris, Frezza is a bona fide knowledgeable person on all this area. I found some guff about him. I don't know exactly what his formal training is but he was an MIT geek in Electrical Engineering etc, plus lots of experience and reading. I think he is qualified to speak and I take his opinions seriously. I like knowledgeable critics, even if they represent opposition. It helps prevent hubris.
I know it isn't a nice thing to say, but his material reads a bit like the Unabomber's manifesto but arriving at the opposite conclusion. One went back to the bush and the other sees the Web and technology as the next stage of humanity [and I suspect the replacement of humanity]. Both as authority defiant solutions.
They are both very bright and spent years uncontaminated by the slobbering masses. Whether we like it or not, we are part of a human continuum from really dum to super smart. Frezza's mind spins freely in all directions while the great bulk of humanity plods to work and back each day, eats dinner, has a drink, gets old and dies. He and Unab are therefore way ahead of their time and think things will go quicker than they do. That leads to frustration and mistakes in judgement as well as overstatement of position.
While holding true to his technical knowledge, he can quite easily trash Qualcomm's efforts. There are problems, but most likely under control. There have been delays, but only a couple of years. There have been improvements by analog and TDMA so CDMA advantages have reduced, but only somewhat. There has been some wishful thinking, but that is far from fraud. He doesn't write from a quietly benign neutral framework; he likes the blood and guts of vigorous debate and if he is paid by Ericsson, he'll be in boots and all.
Yay for Frezza: keeping the bastards honest.
He had several business ventures which failed, taking either his own money or others, and I suspect one of the problems is his own hubris. But that is no disqualification from his current role.
- Maurice - ###
===============
GeorgeX,
<< How about this blast from the past from Bill Frezza, one of the most frequent and vocal Qualcomm bashers from back in the day. Note the last paragraph disclaimer >>
How about it?
You neglected to cite source or article date (April 1995) when IS-95 commercialization was seriously wrapped around an axle and the prior years attempted CDMA launch in Hong Kong had been embarrisingly aborted, and no CDMA network had yet launched, for your post of a Network Computing article by displaced Bell Labs 'genius' "Wireless Bill" Frezza. The source is as follows ...
>> Succumbing To Techno-Seduction
Bill Frezza
Network Computing
Page 39
April 1, 1995
networkcomputing.com
or:
techweb.cmp.com [extinct link] ###
Always wise to cite source, date, and context. It earns you credibility.
For those that are interested here are the two mid-1996 Frezza articles I referenced above and the 2nd is the one kech probably refered to. As an FU in Trenton and a participant in the earlier APC Sprint Spectrum GSM launch I can attest to the accuracy of what Frezza stated ...
>> CDMA / Blazing A Trail Of Broken Dreams
Bill Frezza
Network Computing
page 33
04-15-96
networkcomputing.com
One year ago I took Qualcomm to task for the fantastic claims its executives and investment bankers were making about the capabilities of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital cellular technology. (See "Succumbing to Techno-Seduction," April 1, 1995, page 39).
Now that a few commercial CDMA systems are on the air, I thought it would be timely to revisit these claims. What I found was a Byzantine panorama of hype, obfuscation and denial surrounding a once-promising technology-a technology that has fallen far short of expectations, calling into question billions of dollars in investments by network operators worldwide.
Qualcomm burst on the scene in 1989, claiming that CDMA would offer at least 20 times, and perhaps 40 times, the capacity of analog cellular systems, compared to a mere 3:1 improvement for rival Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) technology. In addition, superior voice quality, fewer dropped calls, easier system engineering and lower infrastructure costs were to herald a new age of wireless that would quickly render TDMA obsolete.
From the beginning, critics warned that the compelling theoretical potential of CDMA would never prove out in the field; dynamic power control in rapidly fading environments would be its Achilles heel; interference would vastly limit capacity; systems under heavy load would be unstable; and power balancing would make infrastructure engineering a nightmare. These warnings were shouted down by a brilliantly orchestrated PR campaign, assisted by what financial analyst Charles Biderman calls the "CDMA Mafia"- a group of key industry figures and Wall Street investment bankers who earned millions from Qualcomm stock offerings.
So Where Are We Now? In the seven years that passed since Qualcomm began making its parade of promises, TDMA-based networks have been commercially deployed in more than 65 countries worldwide, supporting 18 million subscribers, growing at a compound annual rate of almost 200 percent. Technical problems associated with TDMA's first-generation D-AMPS systems have been largely addressed, second-generation GSM systems have taken the world by storm and third-generation PCS-1900 systems are now ramping into high volume. A vast array of low-cost, high-quality phones are on the market and improvements in capacity management techniques like Advanced Channel Allocation (ACA) are slowly moving TDMA systems beyond their baseline capacity performance closer to 6:1 or even 7:1.
CDMA systems, meanwhile, have barely managed to achieve commercial operation in two places-Hong Kong and a suburb of Seoul, South Korea. Comparative field tests with Hutchison's Hong Kong system indicate that its voice quality and dropped call rates don't come close to competing TDMA systems there. To address shortcomings in its product and attract enough subscribers to reach the 10,000 mark required to maintain license compliance, Hutchison was forced to offer an unprecedented flat rate, unlimited calling plan. CDMA phones, meanwhile, remain in short supply due to continued development delays, which is probably just as well, since capacity projections are melting faster than a snowball on a summer day.
A Tale of Two Cities
The most striking example of the differing fates befalling CDMA vs. TDMA operators is to compare Airtouch's experience in Los Angeles with American Personal Communications' (APC) in Washington, D.C. Airtouch was the first cellular operator to commit to CDMA, beginning tests back in 1989, prior to its divestiture by Pacific Telesis. The plan was to upgrade its congested analog system in Los Angeles, turning it into a digital showcase.
After numerous delays, construction began in 1994 with the commercial launch scheduled for early 1995. Motorola, a licensee of Qualcomm, supplied the 200 base stations required to cover the LA region. From the beginning, analog interference, power balancing and poor voice quality plagued the system. Then significant "instabilities" cropped up. As 1994 and 1995 came and went, a wall of silence fell over LA as the CDMA PR machine worked overtime, diverting attention to the lucrative licensing deals Qualcomm was signing with system vendors impelled to bring CDMA into their product line. It became so difficult to obtain information about what was really going on in LA that even George Schmitt, then CEO of PCS Primeco, a partnership of Airtouch, Bell Atlantic, NYNEX and U S West, claims he could not obtain accurate information. (George later resigned, making no secret of his disgust with Primeco's decision to go with CDMA.)
Airtouch is still struggling to get its first cluster of 20 base stations online. Airtouch executives unequivocally will not commit to going commercial in 1996, stating that they will not launch until the quality is at least as good as analog. They also estimate that once the first 20 base stations are online, it may take up to nine months to bring on the remaining 180, each cluster requiring meticulous power balancing before it can be integrated into the system. Yet Qualcomm's brochures still boast that "additional cells or sectors can be added quickly and flexibly with virtually no impact on the existing network plan." Qualcomm CEO Irwin Jacobs, who says he is unaware of these problems at Airtouch, still claims that "optimization for soft hand-off and power balancing is not very critical," and "quality does not depend on tuning."
What about capacity, which is still advertised by Qualcomm as 10 to 20 times that of analog? Airtouch now admits that the system could end up providing a capacity gain of as little as six times that of analog; this is with an 8-Kbps vocoder, which provides markedly inferior voice quality to the 13-Kbps standard that CDMA has adopted to stay competitive with TDMA. At 13 Kbps, capacity drops proportionately to less than four times the capacity of analog.
In contrast, APC decided to deploy TDMA in its Washington/Baltimore system, after testing and rejecting CDMA. Turning on commercial service in November of 1995, APC has already signed up more than 50,000 subscribers. Voice quality is superb, system engineering went without a hitch and users now roam the D.C. area with state-of-the-art phones from multiple vendors that offer built-in paging, caller ID, call waiting, fax and data capabilities. Ominously, Sprint Spectrum, with whom APC is affiliated, selected CDMA for its nationwide deployment, insisting that it will someday overbuild APC's TDMA system. Perhaps so, but first someone has to make CDMA work properly. In a highly publicized break, Motorola walked away from contract negotiations with Sprint over supplying base stations. According to the Wall Street Journal, Motorola balked at the financial terms, which included a 35 percent damage penalty in the event the system "accidentally shuts down."
Shameless in San Diego Undeterred, Qualcomm marches on, recently embarking on a campaign that has inflamed consumer groups with allegations that TDMA products cause dangerous interference to everything from pacemakers to hearing aids to air bags. There is, of course, some basis for concerns that any RF product could indeed interact with such devices. Preliminary studies in Europe indicate a need for caution and further investigation, perhaps suggesting some design changes to mitigate effects. When asked if he was aware of any scientific studies that showed that CDMA phones did not also cause similar interference, Jacobs stated that he was not. With precious few CDMA phones out there to test, how could there be any evidence one way or the other?
As this column went to press, San Diego, Qualcomm's home town, had temporarily halted deployment of PacBell's TDMA system after a personal appearance by Jacobs at a local hearing. The spectacle of an industry vendor precipitating such adverse regulatory reaction has caused widespread alarm in the industry, since most leading manufacturers produce both TDMA and CDMA products. It's a sad commentary when a company resorts to ham- handed tactics that could boomerang if and when its own products ever ship in volume.
As bleak as things appear, even CDMA's most ardent detractors acknowledge that someday, somehow the technology will be made to work, albeit at vastly reduced capacity levels. Too much money and too many careers are on the line to back down. By the time large-scale systems are chicken-wired and bubble-gummed together, though, the promised advantages of CDMA over TDMA will have vanished and we will be awash in aggregate capacity offered by an influx of new operators. Those that chose CDMA, saddled with what could be the most expensive and difficult to engineer wireless infrastructure on the planet, will have to watch as TDMA operators leap ahead, grabbing market share in what is forecast to be a brutally competitive market. This is a far cry from what was promised.
Sooner or later, reality must prevail. Given the aggressiveness with which CDMA was promoted, I wouldn't be surprised to see Qualcomm end its days mired in shareholder lawsuits, trying to deny the very claims once used to hype its stock. In any event, I'll be back in this space same time next year to give you an update.
Bill Frezza is the president of Wireless Computing Associates. In the interest of full disclosure, Wireless Computing provides three days per month of consulting to Ericsson, a vendor of TDMA systems. Bill does not trade in individual equities. The opinions expressed herein are his own. He can be reached at frezza@interramp.com. ###
>> Lucrative Digital Cellular Market Up For Grabs
Bill Frezza
Perspective
InternetWeek
June 3, 1996
internetwk.com
In one of the most heated technology debates of the Information Age, CDMA advocates have squared off against TDMA advocates in a multibillion dollar battle to set worldwide standards for digital cellular and Personal Communications Services (PCS).
While the Code Division Multiple Access contingent concentrated on winning the public relations contest, Time Division Multiple Access vendors quietly deployed commercial systems in more than 89 coun tries, establishing an 18-million user installed base that is growing at almost 200 percent per year. By contrast, CDMA systems have achieved commercial launch in just two markets so far--Hong Kong and a suburb of Seoul, South Korea--with a combined subscriber count of less than 20,000.
Meanwhile, efforts by Airtouch and U S West to upgrade analog cellular networks to CDMA in Los Angeles and Seattle continue to flounder.
While the the sizable head start of TDMA and the immense investment behind CDMA makes the final outcome uncertain, both sides agree 1996 is going to be a pivotal year. With numerous CDMA systems scheduled to come on-line before the year is out--including the 20 to 25 markets promised by the Sprint Telecom Venture and the 11 markets promised by PrimeCo Personal Communications--real-world performance can finally be compared to the theoretical models touted by CDMA's aggressive promoters.
The three most closely watched parameters will be capacity, coverage and voice quality. The first two have a direct bearing on relative system costs while the latter is the key to user acceptance. The common wisdom is CDMA will be so far superior in these areas that TDMA will be stopped in its tracks.
In 1989, Qualcomm introduced CDMA technology to the cellular market, promising to deliver 20 to 40 times the capacity of analog systems, compared to the initial three-times-analog capacity for TDMA. These claims have since been reduced to 10 to 20 times analog, yet recent results indicate that not even these numbers can be achieved. Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile, which in April activated an 11-cell-site, precommercial CDMA network in the Trenton, N.J. area, has so far achieved a 6:1 capacity increase over analog, gaining 12 digital channels for every two analog channels taken out of service. These benefits should not be minimized, yet the facts now show financial comparisons based on the higher capacity figures border on misrepresentation.
Initial results indicate similar shortfalls in cell-site coverage projections. CDMA advocates contend each cellular base station will deliver two to five times the coverage area of either analog or TDMA base stations. Airtouch appears to have taken this claim at face value, upgrading to CDMA only one out of every two to three of its existing analog base stations in Los Angeles. Analysts believe this is one of the principal reasons--after struggling for more than two years--that Airtouch still has not been able to cut over to commercial operation. Instead, interference and power balancing have turned into an engineering nightmare.
Bell Atlantic, on the other hand, deployed CDMA in every one of the analog cell sites in its test area and believes a 1:1 deployment ratio will be necessary throughout its entire system. While this rate of deployment meets Bell Atlantic's own upgrade objectives, a reduction of coverage estimates will have a significant impact on the economics of CDMA.
Finally, there is the issue of voice quality. Poor voice quality plagued first-generation TDMA systems, which used the D-AMPS standard. The problem tarnished TDMA's reputation while forcing operators to learn many painful lessons on how to properly install and engineer digital systems. These lessons paid off in the deployment of second-generation TDMA systems based on the GSM and PCS-1900 standards, which offer markedly superior quality.
I recently began using one of the 300 CDMA phones Bell Atlantic has on its test system in Trenton. The phones use a 13-kilobits-per-second vocoder--a choice Bell Atlantic felt was important, fearing the 8-Kbps vocoder in first-generation CDMA systems would not be competitive. Although you can still hear the vocoder distortions and an occasional digital squeal, the voice quality is certainly acceptable. At best, however, it is equal to TDMA phones based on GSM or PCS-1900.
The bottom line is that neither system appears to have a compelling quality advantage. Given the incremental capacity and coverage improvements made in TDMA since it was first introduced, the two technologies will probably end up quite similar in most of their performance parameters. A come-from-behind CDMA knockout punch, therefore, looks rather remote.
As CDMA vendors continue to win new contracts on the strength of old promises, adding to the huge order backlog of non-delivered systems, the TDMA forces have drawn first blood in the closely watched PCS market.
Washington network operator American Personal Communications, which decided to deploy a PCS-1900 system after testing and rejecting CDMA, has already signed up more than 70,000 customers in its first six months of operation.
If this lightning success is repeated in other markets, CDMA operators could be in for a nasty surprise. Given the number of carriers that ultimately will be crowding the airwaves, the rapidity with which CDMA's theoretical advantages are melting and the repeated delays in delivery, TDMA's considerable head start and quiet perseverance could prove decisive.
Bill Frezza is president at Wireless Computing Associates and co-founder of the on-line forum DigitaLiberty. He can be reached at frezza@interramp.com or techweb.cmp.com/gurus ###
I have a lot more treasures from the Frezza / Brodsky archives but this is our long time friend Jim Lurgio sharing an August 7, 1996 "Wireless Bill" e-mail to him with longtime QUALCOMM board contributor Michael Allard while several of us (including me) were participating in the Trenton BAM trials ...
>> Mike,
I contacted Bill Frezza and asked him about the responses he made on the Air Touch conference call and sent him your post He e-mailed me this response on Air Touch.
===
James,
No, I haven't disappeared. I was, in fact, on the Airtouch conference call and the questions I asked were accurately reported. Voice quality on the Qualcomm QCP-800 phone operating at 13 Kbps is, in truth, quite good. Is it better than GSM? In my opinion, it's a wash. Both sides will produce studies showing that their vocoder is preferred by consumers.
The Bell Atlantic CDMA system does have a significant problem with vocoder delay which is very annoying if you are talking with someone who never learned speakerphone etiquette. I have no idea how the market is going to react to this.
When I asked Lee Cox about the vocoder delay problem, he waved it off.
More importantly, I believe that all of my statements about CDMA capacity have now been vindicated. Bell Atlantic is experiencing a 6x capacity gain over AMPS. Airtouch is claiming 6x - 10x in LA and you can use your own judgement as to which end of this range they are actually achieving. Note that this is at 8 Kbps. It seems that Airtouch has finally admitted that it has to abandon 8 Kbps vocoders, which means the capacity gains will be reduced proportionately, down to 3.5x - 6x, which is PRECISELY what I said in my column last spring. Nobody, nowhere is getting 10x-20x AMPS and nobody ever will. But hey, the system sales have already been made, so this bogus claim can now be quietly dropped. Same with the so-called coverage advantages of CDMA, which are absolutely nonexistent. The only reason Bell Atlantic has gotten CDMA to almost work in Trenton is that they have upgraded each and every AMPS cellsite. And only a fool still believes that CDMA systems are easier to engineer, install, and power balance than CDMA systems. The facts are in on this one.
Notwithstanding Airtouch's brilliant ambush PR initiative in San Diego, it is becoming clear that CDMA has been a total failure at 800 MHz. Airtouch's "controlled migration" plan is a scam - an excuse to shield these products from the public for as long as possible. All that effort to migrate 15% of their traffic to digital, which probably equates to less than 3% of their customers? Give me a break. Airtouch has been "commercial" in LA since May and all they have is a few hundred customers? That represents a couple of hours worth of new activations on APC's TDMA system in Washington DC. US West has gone invisible in Seattle. Bell Atlantic will still not commit to launching commercial service in 1996, notwithstanding the outright lies in Qualcomm's press releases claiming that the system is already in commercial operation. Call failure rates are too high, dropped calls remain a problem, and digital to analog handoff is still not working right. (Note that Airtouch isn't even trying to make d/a handoffs work in San Diego.) Not only that, but positioning digital as a higher-cost premium service is going to be a disaster when all of the new PCS operators are coming to market offering digital at a discount! It's all over at 800 MHz except for the recriminations. My prediction is you will see the supply side of the industry walk away from 800 MHz as vendors put all their efforts into trying to make CDMA work for PCS up at 1900.
As for the many promised advantages of CDMA, when the dust settles there is going to be one and only one differential benefit left standing, and that is battery life. (I really am getting 5 hours of talk time on my QCP-800.) Granted, this is important to heavy users. But is it worth the inordinate delay, the loss of market share to TDMA operators, and the significantly higher costs of CDMA infrastructure? Not to mention the one thing that no one knows yet - will these systems be stable under heavy load?
As for the CDMA Forum on my web site, the whole thing is on hold as CMP (my publisher) has decided to terminate the Techweb Gurus experiment. I am in the process of setting up a new web site under the auspices of Network Computing magazine, where I hope to continue the CDMA dialogue, but these things take time.
Feel free to circulate or repost this note in any discussion forums on this subject.
Regards,
Bill Frezza -- frezza@interramp.com -- 215-321-0929 ###
I have one final comment. For those of us that followed CDMA pre-commercialization diligently as Maurice and I and others did, "Wireless Bill's" CDMA forum was THE best place to do it. Not just the best, perhaps the only place other than the board Maurice later founded here on SI.
Cheers,
- Eric - |
