Nokia Axes CDMA..chop chops

The company's decision to cut back its CDMA plans has led to a jobs
cull affecting half its San Diego campus

Nokia is cutting around 500 jobs at its San Diego campus - half the
workforce at that location - following its decision to cut back its
plans for CDMA technology, a rival standard to GSM which is used by
one-fifth of the world's mobile phones, according to local press
reports.

Those hit by the jobs cull will be offered a severance package or
relocation within the company working on GSM projects. The layoffs are
scheduled to take place in several waves between the end of 2006 and
the middle of next year.

Nokia won't stop working with CDMA entirely but will instead focus its
efforts on outsourced projects with third-party manufacturers. It
recently withdrew from a joint venture with Sanyo to develop CDMA
offerings, saying the ecosystem is "financially prohibitive".

The news follows a long-running spat between Nokia and Qualcomm, which
owns CDMA patents.
....
The facility will be restructured to focus on production of cell phones
based on GSM, or global system for mobile communication, technology,
said Timo Ihamuotila, senior vice president and general manager of
Nokia's CDMA mobile phone business. That system is used in the United
States by Cingular, T-Mobile and other carriers.

Ihamuotila said the Finnish company would continue to produce
Nokia-branded CDMA phones through third-party manufacturers overseas.

The layoffs, announced Tuesday, will not take effect for a couple
months, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. A Nokia spokesman did not
immediately respond to a phone message asking about the timing.

---

› See More: Nokia Axes CDMA..chop chops

[email protected] wrote:

> The company's decision to cut back its CDMA plans has led to a jobs
> cull affecting half its San Diego campus

And this should surprise no one, given recent news and the fact that Nokia
was never committed to CDMA in the first place.


--
Steve Sobol, Professional Geek ** Java/VB/VC/PHP/Perl ** Linux/*BSD/Windows
Apple Valley, California PGP:0xE3AE35ED

It's all fun and games until someone starts a bonfire in the living room.

Look at the Nokia 6305i, its not a real nokia phone, but its made by Pantech..... A lot of emerging markets are using GSM, and emerging markets are a top priority for Nokia, so it will focus on GSM instead. In contrast, Nokia made some pretty decent CDMA phones.

Steve Sobol wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
>
>> The company's decision to cut back its CDMA plans has led to a jobs
>> cull affecting half its San Diego campus
>>
>
> And this should surprise no one, given recent news and the fact that Nokia
> was never committed to CDMA in the first place

Why shouldn't they? CDMA is old technology that is being phased out
around most of the world. They are better off looking to the future
with GSM and UMTS, which that article failed to even mention.


--
The views I present are that of my own and NOT of any organisation I may
belong to.

73 de Simon, VK3XEM.

Simon Templar wrote:

>> And this should surprise no one, given recent news and the fact that
>> Nokia
>> was never committed to CDMA in the first place
>
> Why shouldn't they? CDMA is old technology

Nokia wasn't committed to CDMA 10 years ago, either. Strawman argument.

--
Steve Sobol, Professional Geek ** Java/VB/VC/PHP/Perl ** Linux/*BSD/Windows
Apple Valley, California PGP:0xE3AE35ED

It's all fun and games until someone starts a bonfire in the living room.

Steve Sobol wrote:
> Simon Templar wrote:
>
>>> And this should surprise no one, given recent news and the fact that
>>> Nokia
>>> was never committed to CDMA in the first place
>>>
>> Why shouldn't they? CDMA is old technology
>>
>
> Nokia wasn't committed to CDMA 10 years ago, either. Strawman argument

They were smart then! You can thank Qalcom for their greedy licensing
arrangements for killing off CDMA, it has NOTHING to do with Nokia, they
just weren't prepared to be ripped off.


--
The views I present are that of my own and NOT of any organisation I may
belong to.

73 de Simon, VK3XEM.

Simon Templar wrote:

> They were smart then! You can thank Qalcom for their greedy licensing
> arrangements for killing off CDMA, it has NOTHING to do with Nokia, they
> just weren't prepared to be ripped off.

They still have to pay Qualcomm for UMTS/HSDPA. The world is moving to
CDMA, in one way or another. Whether it's GSM for voice/CDMA for data,
or CDMA for both voice and data, the future is CDMA. Qualcomm profits
either way. Yes, Qualcomm's royalty demands have affected CDMA voice
deployment in third-world countries, but that's a business decision they
made.

GSM is old technology, and cannot support the bandwidth demands in the
future.

SMS wrote:
> Simon Templar wrote:
>
>> They were smart then! You can thank Qalcom for their greedy licensing
>> arrangements for killing off CDMA, it has NOTHING to do with Nokia,
>> they just weren't prepared to be ripped off.
>
>
> They still have to pay Qualcomm for UMTS/HSDPA. The world is moving to
> CDMA, in one way or another. Whether it's GSM for voice/CDMA for data,
> or CDMA for both voice and data, the future is CDMA. Qualcomm profits
> either way. Yes, Qualcomm's royalty demands have affected CDMA voice
> deployment in third-world countries, but that's a business decision they
> made.
>
> GSM is old technology, and cannot support the bandwidth demands in the
> future.

The IPR world also means that Qualcomm pays Nokia for patents aswell.
The difference is not that big, between them, infact Nokia has more
"essential" patents than Qualcomm.

With regard to your "world is moving to CDMA" ... Hmmm maybe you should
be looking to the real world rather than just USA.

Simon Templar wrote:

>> Nokia wasn't committed to CDMA 10 years ago, either. Strawman argument
>
> They were smart then! You can thank Qalcom for their greedy licensing
> arrangements for killing off CDMA, it has NOTHING to do with Nokia, they
> just weren't prepared to be ripped off.

Funny, considering that UMTS is based on a number of Qualcomm patents,
and they will be getting royalties from that anyway.

Also funnytat you say CDMA is an "old technology." Actually, GSM is
much older. And the other name for UMTS is "W-CDMA," and incorporates a
lot of the same principles. But, you GSM-snobs keep conveniently
forgetting that.

The fact is simply that Nokia sees its skills better used in UMTS. Or
at least, I *hope* that's the case, considering GSM's days in its
current form are quite numbered. Eventually, those carriers will
migrate to UMTS, and many have already started in that direction.

cdmaOne and CDMA2000, on the other hand, have never been Nokia's
strongpoint. They made a grievous error by trying to develop their own
chispets, which were largely subpar. The build quality of the CDMA
handsets, as well as RF performance, was and is horrible.

So it makes sense for Nokia to give up. That leaves plenty of room for
the other major playors in CDMA: Motorola (who is rounding Nokia these
days, both in GSM and CDMA), Kyocera, Samsung, LG, Sanyo.

And in the end, it'll be moot anyway. Carriers from bother sides of the
standards war are already workign toward a 4G bridge standard, that will
unify the two camps.

--
E-mail fudged to thwart spammers.
Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply.

BT News wrote:

> With regard to your "world is moving to CDMA" ... Hmmm maybe you should
> be looking to the real world rather than just USA.

Heh! You need to read the 3GPP documentation. It's quite clear what
UMTS actually IS:

http://www.umtsworld.com/technology/wcdma.htm


It also amazes me how the GSM snobs think that GSM and CDMA are the only
standards out there. There's Widen, TD-SCDMA, TDCDMA, NTT DoCoMo's own
implementation of WCDMA with is incompatible with EVERYONE else, and
EVDO Rev 0, A and soon B. And soon there will be WiMAX and OFDM.

In reality, there is hardly a dichotomy out there. It's an alphabet
soup with may players and many incompatibilities.


--
E-mail fudged to thwart spammers.
Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply.

Isaiah Beard wrote:

>
> cdmaOne and CDMA2000, on the other hand, have never been Nokia's
> strongpoint. They made a grievous error by trying to develop their own
> chispets, which were largely subpar. The build quality of the CDMA
> handsets, as well as RF performance, was and is horrible.
>

Exactly, I know someone involved in qualification and Nokia simply
couldn't make a good CDMA handset.



> So it makes sense for Nokia to give up. That leaves plenty of room for
> the other major playors in CDMA: Motorola (who is rounding Nokia these
> days, both in GSM and CDMA), Kyocera, Samsung, LG, Sanyo.
>
> And in the end, it'll be moot anyway. Carriers from bother sides of the
> standards war are already workign toward a 4G bridge standard, that will
> unify the two camps.
>

Qualcomm shutdown CDMA base station development many years ago. For unknown
reason, Qualcomm could not build a successful CDMA base station. It has been
a bad sign for CDMA of Qualcomm in the future. It just can't go on with
CDMA. I believe that AT&T will kill CDMA of Qualcomm once for all.


"George" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Isaiah Beard wrote:
>
>>
>> cdmaOne and CDMA2000, on the other hand, have never been Nokia's
>> strongpoint. They made a grievous error by trying to develop their own
>> chispets, which were largely subpar. The build quality of the CDMA
>> handsets, as well as RF performance, was and is horrible.
>>
>
> Exactly, I know someone involved in qualification and Nokia simply
> couldn't make a good CDMA handset.
>
>
>
>> So it makes sense for Nokia to give up. That leaves plenty of room for
>> the other major playors in CDMA: Motorola (who is rounding Nokia these
>> days, both in GSM and CDMA), Kyocera, Samsung, LG, Sanyo.
>>
>> And in the end, it'll be moot anyway. Carriers from bother sides of the
>> standards war are already workign toward a 4G bridge standard, that will
>> unify the two camps.
>>

Isaiah Beard <[email protected]> wrote in news:12dunivl37vif55
@corp.supernews.com:

> And soon there will be WiMAX and OFDM

And his points will be moot....(c;

Just got off the phone with someone new in Strasbourg, France, on Skype.
He had his laptop hanging out the window to make it to "someone's wifi"
that was open....(c;

Cost to call Strasbourg for an hour from the USA? Priceless!

"Sco" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Qualcomm shutdown CDMA base station development many years ago. For
unknown
> reason, Qualcomm could not build a successful CDMA base station. It has
been
> a bad sign for CDMA of Qualcomm in the future. It just can't go on with
> CDMA. I believe that AT&T will kill CDMA of Qualcomm once for all.


Didn't at&t use tmda?????


>
>
> "George" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
> > Isaiah Beard wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> cdmaOne and CDMA2000, on the other hand, have never been Nokia's
> >> strongpoint. They made a grievous error by trying to develop their own
> >> chispets, which were largely subpar. The build quality of the CDMA
> >> handsets, as well as RF performance, was and is horrible.
> >>
> >
> > Exactly, I know someone involved in qualification and Nokia simply
> > couldn't make a good CDMA handset.
> >
> >
> >
> >> So it makes sense for Nokia to give up. That leaves plenty of room for
> >> the other major playors in CDMA: Motorola (who is rounding Nokia these
> >> days, both in GSM and CDMA), Kyocera, Samsung, LG, Sanyo.
> >>
> >> And in the end, it'll be moot anyway. Carriers from bother sides of
the
> >> standards war are already workign toward a 4G bridge standard, that
will
> >> unify the two camps.
> >>
>
>

AT&T used to use TDMA. Now, AT&T uses HSDPA. Ericson took over Qualcomm's
CDMA cell site business when Qualcomm sold it. It was the end of Qualcomm
CDMA cell site business.


"Phillip Devoll" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:97ODg.5355$%[email protected]...
>
> "Sco" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>> Qualcomm shutdown CDMA base station development many years ago. For
> unknown
>> reason, Qualcomm could not build a successful CDMA base station. It has
> been
>> a bad sign for CDMA of Qualcomm in the future. It just can't go on with
>> CDMA. I believe that AT&T will kill CDMA of Qualcomm once for all.
>
>
> Didn't at&t use tmda?????
>
>
>>
>>
>> "George" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>> news:[email protected]...
>> > Isaiah Beard wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >> cdmaOne and CDMA2000, on the other hand, have never been Nokia's
>> >> strongpoint. They made a grievous error by trying to develop their
>> >> own
>> >> chispets, which were largely subpar. The build quality of the CDMA
>> >> handsets, as well as RF performance, was and is horrible.
>> >>
>> >
>> > Exactly, I know someone involved in qualification and Nokia simply
>> > couldn't make a good CDMA handset.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >> So it makes sense for Nokia to give up. That leaves plenty of room
>> >> for
>> >> the other major playors in CDMA: Motorola (who is rounding Nokia these
>> >> days, both in GSM and CDMA), Kyocera, Samsung, LG, Sanyo.
>> >>
>> >> And in the end, it'll be moot anyway. Carriers from bother sides of
> the
>> >> standards war are already workign toward a 4G bridge standard, that
> will
>> >> unify the two camps.
>> >>
>>
>>
>
>