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

To: waitwatchwander who wrote (16657)	10/16/1998 1:11:00 PM
From: Valueman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

One point that is overlooked here, and was made apparent to me by an individual that is both well informed and gracious enough to share his knowledge, is that the 3g debate is more over "turf" than "what is best." If the 3g solution was deemed to be cdma2000 today, ERICY would be in a world of hurt. They do not have this technology ready to implement, and would lose years in trying to perfect and implement this solution. In that time, QCOM/LU/NT would roll through Europe and destroy that stranglehold. In the same vein, if W-CDMA is chosen, ERICY is first to market, keeping that European market in their pocket. QCOM has not been working on W-CDMA, and it would take them time to get up to speed. In their case, that could be deadly if there are no royalties/license fees involved. The ERICY solution keeps the infrastructure cost up(high more basestations, etc.) and contracts rich, and gets them to market first. A compromise would level the playing field, make everyone work on a similar solution, with similar "time to market" scenarios. That is OK by QCOM I would think, and not an acceptable solution for ERICY at this time. We shall see.

To: waitwatchwander who wrote (16657)	10/16/1998 5:40:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

CDMA-2000, W-CDMA, CDMAOne trimode handsets. Although currently this is not likely to be technologically feasible (I need to really dig into the meat of CDMA-2000 and W-CDMA in order to be able to say with certainty), I'd be surprised if Qualcomm had designed CDMA-2000 such that a CDMAOne phone wouldn't work with it. The reason is that CDMAOne and WCDMA use different RF (the way the radio waves are modulated and where/what added data is transmitted), IF (e.g. the way the chip'ing is done), and baseband schemes (e.g. voice coding and error correction). A lot of the underlying technology is the same, but the actual standards are quite different. Currently it is possible to do much of the baseband processing in software (since baseband processing involves pretty low frequencies), so you need only one chip and two software packages, but for IF you would probably need a very powerful processor to do the processing in software, which probably isn't practical in a mobile system (although strictly speaking this is somewhat outside my area of expertise). And in RF we just don't have the technology yet. Thus a dual mode phone would probably need at least two separate and fairly sophisticated RF and IF systems. This would make a dual mode phone pretty clunky. (Note that the same is true for dual analog/CDMA phones, but the difference is that analog is so simple that the added hardware doesn't add much space or power consumption.) Clark PS Sometime in the next 5 or 10 years it probably will become possible to do everything in software, and at that point dual mode will become trivial, but ... .