InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

[Learning2vest]

WTDD is where a lot of the gold will be found in the IDCC claimstake, if you catch the analogy. What i like most about the InterDigital design approach for 3G is the way everything fits together to deliver pretty much what the commercial market is going to want, and that it appears to get that done a lot better than anything else(anything else available or under development!).

Sure looks like InterDigital had a clear, and on target IMO, strategic outlook for where the wireless marketplace was going, and then "purpose-built" their W-CDMA(FDD/WTDD) solution to address that vision. They evolved FDD from the early work experience with B-CDMA to handle wide-area coverage requirements more efficiently than anything else, and then developed WTDD to address the "hotspots" and local "in-building" requirements better than the WLAN stuff currently being used for those needs. AND they were smart enough to design those two technologies from the start to work together in a "seamless" manner.

Lot's of work to get done in a wide range of areas before what InterDigital designed(and patented!) for 3G can be commercially implemented, but that work sure appears to be underway and making good progess..... examples include;

Need to build chips that can handle the design requirements and deliver acceptable performance at reasonable cost(IFX is working on that with IDCC), gotta have software to run on those chips(Commenon is working on that with IDCC), wireless operators need to acquire spectrum rights and begin deploying the W-CDMA FDD stuff(that was a scary hurtle to get over, but things are beginning to look a lot better lately).

Somebody is going to have to commit to building WTDD into their wireless equipment(Nokia apparently balked on their WTDD support, so InterDigital commissioned an independent study and took the WTDD story directly to the wireless operators, used their 2G litigation leverage to get Ericsson's attention focused on WTDD development(IMO), and IDCC engineers have continued to make progress in their development of a tri-mode GSM/W-CDMA(FDD/WTDD) product solution).

Howard mentioned what I hope is the only area he is worried about when he said something like "data on the move is coming, what we are going to need are lot's of applications and content offerings to allow people to do what they want to do with that mobile data". Content and applications for high speed wireless access. That's the development frontier we need some help with at this point IMO.