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

To: DaveMG who wrote (16733)	10/19/1998 10:20:00 AM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

DaveMG - I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say backward compatibility with GSM is impossible.Are you saying that in order to implement WCDMA carriers will have to rip out their entire GSM infrastructure and start over again, and that what ERICY and ETSI are trying to do is create a "standard" that will also force CDMAone carriers who want to participate to rip the guts out of their systems too? Sorry, my miscommunication. I was referring to the air interface. They will still be able to use some of the same infrastructure for the ground-to-ground interface. But, if they install the new system and still want to service the old GSM users they will need to have almost completely redundant hardware for the new air interface and even then I'm not sure if will be able to use the system at all because I don't know if W-CDMA is made to be operated for partial spectrum allocations. However, CDMA-2000, since it uses the same basic technology as CDMAOne, can use much of the same hardware and it is made to take advantage of new spectrum as it becomes available. It's still not clear to me however why 2 standards, WCDMA and CDMA2000, would be so terrible for QCOM If they do allow two different standards, one of which is a version of WCDMA that is almost completely incompatible with CDMAOne, then the problems are: 1) Qualcomm loses the ability to say 'order our CDMAOne system now, before WCDMA is available, and it will be easily upgraded to the world standard when it comes out.'. They might still be able to say it is easily upgraded to CDMA-2000, but ... (See point #2.) Thus, Qualcomm could lose much of their current business in the waiting period for WCDMA. 2) The big advantage that CDMAOne offers is cost of ownership. CDMA-2000 will lose much of that advantage to W-CDMA. Clark PS On the issue of Ericsson's patents, I do not know any better than you. It takes a lot of work to chase through all of the patents and current state-of-the-art to determine this kind of thing. I think Ericsson is much like the boy who cried wolf, but that isn't news to anyone here.