Mannerisms

Pretty much the only reason why it's not a done and dusted deal that WiMAX is the technology to take us beyond 3G is because of the vast investment in cellular networks, their licences and the deployed equipment.

Of course the CDMA people are fighting hard to show that all their enhancement technologies, HSDPA, HSUPA and LTE will do the job as well as WiMAX.

But what will be the cost of deploying the CDMA enhancements? And will the network operators meet that cost? And who wants a system where 60 per cent of the IP is controlled by Qualcomm?

The entire worldwide electronics industry suffered for a couple of decades when Microsoft and Intel sucked virtually all the profit out of the PC industry, which was, for 20 years, the chip industry's major customer, simply because the Wintel pair owned most of the IP.

No one, absolutely no one except probably Qualcomm, wants to see such a situation repeat itself in the electronics industry ever again. Standards are brilliant at stimulating innovation but, when ruthlessly exploited for profit by people with a dominant IP position, they strangle innovation.

So the telecoms industry is at an interesting crossroads. Either it can stick with the cellular approach, and burden itself with vastly bigger upgrade costs than WiMAX installation would entail, or it can go with the cheaper WiMAX option.

"It's all about spectrum efficiency", says NXP's CTO Rene Penning de Vries, "in the end that would be the most important criterion. I tend to believe that WiMAX would be the one. 4G will be based on WiMAX if it has the performance which outperforms the other standards. If WiMAX doesn't have the performance of extended CDMA then WiMAX won't be successful."

TOMORROW MORNING: TEN GREATEST ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY COCK-UPS.