To: tero kuittinen who wrote (14663 ) 9/8/1998 1:03:00 AM From: Asterisk Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 152472
Tero: You are right, nothing in this world is truly black and white, everything is a shade of grey. In your instance I sometimes wonder how opaque you are though (just kidding). If I may I would like to address a few of your "points". 1) Let's bury this moldering corpse of "CDMA overlays in Europe". There wasn't, there isn't, there ain't never gonna be. The push for this began in January. It is September now. Nothing's cooking. How could it? There was a trial system set up in England of the overlay that you are talking about. There were no commercial systems set up that have a CDMA overlay over GSM, how could there be? ESTI as an organization has stopped CDMA (other than WCDMA) dead in its tracks. They won't let GSM be challenged, they have taken the approach that it is better to have economies of scale for the development of cheaper phones so that the carriers can give them away at even cheaper rates. That is fine, it is one approach, the Japaneese (ARIB?) took the same approach but chose CDMA instead of GSM. Everyone has to make their decisions for themselves. But your arguement that there are no commercial CDMA overlays is as I have said flawed from the get go, in europe ETSI has blocked CDMA, and everywhere else people (when they had a free choice) have by far chosen CDMA over GSM once it was available. 2)* I can argue that GSM is mainly an Asian standard. The biggest GSM country in the world is China. The fastest GSM subscription growth in the world takes place in Asia. In three years the total GSM subscriber base of Europe will be overtaken by Asia. This "European standard" does not work as a propaganda tool anymore. Here the situation is black and white. GSM was, is, and will be a European standard, but so what it really makes no difference where the standard was filed it only makes a difference where it is used. For the rest of your statements I have to point out some things that have been bought up before. China is corrupt, as is most of the third world. The Chineese are putting a great show of trying to deal with this right now but by all credible accounts it is still a HUGE problem. In the past ERICY has done business there, thus they know the lay of the land and already have the important people pegged and in their pockets. How do you expect QCOM to compete with that? In the past the Telecom world of China was very confusing and convoluted, since the beurocracy has been "streamlined", whatever that means, it will be interesting to see how QCOM fares in the future. They are still at a disadvantage because all that happened was the previous system was folded into one ladder, but it will be interesting to see what happens. Also, along the same lines. If you take the expansion of the already installed systems of China out how fast is Asian GSM expanding? 3) The rest of your post accuses America of being xenophobic. You want to see Xenophobia go to Japan, France, or Quebec. In my way of thinking Canada (as a general case), and the US (as a general case) are the least xenophopbic places in the world right now. The only reason that you think otherwise is that all you hear is the press trying to sell papers. To do that they hype the feelings of an extreme and extremely small minority into the hype that you are currently seeing. You go to any of the major metropolitan areas (Seattle, New York, San Fran., Chicago) and you see just how xenophobic america is when you walk into chinatown, little odessa, little italy and you see all of the signs in their native tongues and hear all of the languages being spoken and see the melting pot that America really is. After you have done your homework on the xenophobia of America come back and we'll talk. Until then you may want to keep your own xenophobia in check! As a closing point I would like to emphasize something that others have also said, it is definately not in the interest of Motorola, Nokia, or Lucent to cut off one of their arms (TDMA/CDMA) before a clear winner has been declared in the format wars. Everything is business, I am sure that if you cracked a QCOM phone open you would see Motorola parts, yet they are suing each other. That is because in business while you are trying to crush a company with one hand you can do business and sell to it with the other, they are not mutually exclusive.