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

To: Asterisk who wrote (9271)	3/17/1998 9:48:00 PM
From: w molloy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Re: That is not totally true. Hi Michael, At the risk of another wrist slap from Surfer Mike.. (CAVEAT : all the following is my humble opinion) I was addressing rhet0ric's specific query about the difference between TCP/IP;CDMA and TDMA (see message 9192). My answer is imperfect, as all analogies are. Now onto your mail. I wasn't suggesting that no-one would ever upgrade infrastructure. I thought I was implying the opposite, by adopting a layered approach it was in fact easier (in theory) to upgrade, hence my analogy of substituting the cups and wet string with a telephone. I agree with you that there was a deeper question regarding which air interface is more suitable for operators; CDMA or TDMA. My honest answer is I don't know. Operators are primarily interested in revenue (for their shareholders). They will pick the technology that they think will allow them to maximize the revenue generators (i.e. paying customers, and the services that these customers desire) for the minimum network rollout and maintenance costs. Clearly, capacity is a key driver for maximizing revenue. CDMA offers a major theoretical capacity advantage over GSM, and a probable practical one, however many questions remain. For example, there was a recent posting on this thread reporting a Singapore network that required 25% more CDMA basestations to achieve the same coverage of a GSM network. (no - I can't supply the specific mail reference. Perhaps another reader can?). Personally, I'm interested in how CDMA performs when sharing the same geographical footprint as a GSM network in the same frequency band, (Surfer Mike - Is this reasonable/possible?) Adopting CDMA is a risk and it is this risk that GSM pundits were exploiting. You also say that "CDMA is more efficient because it has the same packetized approach as both TCP/IP and PPP" Well TDMA (and I mean GSM, DECT, PHS et al) is packet oriented too. Are you are implying that CDMA is more optimized for TCP/IP than TDMA? This can't be. It is possible to send a 65535 byte IP datagram, although most implementations (For example, those that support Network File System, NFS) allow for just over 8192 byte IP datagrams. Now, intermediate layers (specifically the Link Layer) will fragment these datagrams to a form suitable for the underlying Physical interface, whether it's CDMA or TDMA packets (or even Ethernet frames.) What I am saying is that there are separate layers in the protocol stack and these layers are independent. This is why you can't say that CDMA is better than TDMA for TCP/IP. The question really is moot, because the intervening layers, will tailor the datagrams for the underlying Physical interface. Now (at the risk of putting words into you mouth), did you mean that CDMA is inherently more suitable for TCP/IP because of its greater capacity? w.

To: Asterisk who wrote (9271)	3/17/1998 11:52:00 PM
From: rhet0ric	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

What I mean is that it doesn't matter that both TDMA and CDMA work, they odviously do. The deeper and more important question (that I believe the pup was looking at) was which is cheaper and possibly better in the long run for operators to use? Does "pup" refer to me? Is this another thread-specific canine reference, or am I missing something? I was actually asking the former, i.e. does CDMA have a distinct advantage because of a similarity between code division and TCP/IP packets. So my question was answered. You're right, though, that the larger question of which is faster/more reliable/cheaper is more important (especially since my question turned out to be moot). I also had another motive, and that was to swing some of the conversation to something besides telephony. Maybe it's because I'm immersed in Web work, but I see Qualcomm as a diversified communications company with an eye on the big picture. This Korea thing is just a blip. If Qualcomm executes well, they could dominate mobile Internet messaging. Does anyone else think this is important? rhet0ric