To: Maurice Winn who wrote (6777 ) 12/30/1997 7:50:00 PM From: engineer Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 152472
I too think that alot more phones will be sold outside Korea next year and that the Korean manufacturers have just learned how to make the phones well. As for the B-CDMA or WCDMA, if you look at the problem versus cdmaOne backfitted onto GSM, the hard part is the air interface electronics. If you go back and look at the history of the GSM rollout, it took them like 10-11 years to get to the point where CDMA is today in terms of chip integrations, power levels, size, weight, etc... Not to mention the buildup of the basestations. this is a tremendous effort, one which took many, many big companies many years to accomplish. Given that they make it work and given that they can produce the electronics in half the time due to lots of technology advances and learning curves, it still puts W-CDMA out 4-6 years to the start and then from there they have to push down the learning curves and development cycles to produce world class handsets. Now if you take the retrofit of the cdmaOne basestation onto the GSM switches, it is a simple digital protocol change at the basestation and some protocol changes in the handset. The learning curves are in software, not in VERY high tech microelectronics or RF chips (which are the very most painful to develop in the world...). by the time the W-CDMA even would be operational and competitive, the cdmaOne stuff would have been commonplace (read...down the cost curves). I think most of the vodaphone stuff is running using the QCP-800 phones modified slightly to take Euorpean SIM cards. So if there were people pushing hard on W-CDMA and at the same time pushing hard on next gen cdmaOne at higher rates, then which one would you choose if you were in say, China trying to get the lowest cost per user on a WLL system? If you had GSM switches, then maybe GSM to start with, then cdmaOne on the WLL side for cost? maybe start with cdmaOne if you didn't already have GSM and stay with this? Or maybe your a max'ed out European Phone company who can't get any more users due to maximum frequency allocations and you want to expand in 1998 with more capacity? Makes for some interesting scenarios out there......And I got more than 32 hours until New Years....3 or 4 points in the last 2 days is going the right direction again.... Best Wishes Engineer..