QCOM's message: 3G is here to stay

Implications: QCOM and its cheerleaders (Mr Seybold among them) will be touting 3G incremental enhancements as the only real option for operators at the moment, do not expect big pushes for LTE, since inviting operators to do that open the door to also consider WiMax (none of those are incremental steps from existing wireless technologies). While offering options to delay the decision to replace existing 3G networks with something entirely new, QCOM is choking Intel and blocking the possibility for a WiMax ecosystem to be bron.

Analysis:  QCOM has all incentives to continue developing and evolution path for DO and HSPA and having operators to wait more for anything 4G.  

If operators have incremental and affordable gains migrating to Rev B or HSPA+ or whatever comes next (QCOM current strategy as you can see on recent white papers, live presentations, etc) they also con delay the process of considering 4G technologies (all of them, being LTE or WiMax with UMB clearly dead by now).  

Since no other major operator has commited itself to Mobile WiMax, this technology is 100% dependant on Clearwire success. The best thing that can happen to QCOM is to be succesful at providing incremental gains in performance with current 3G technologies (something QCOM can control), while waiting for Clearwire to be either an unsuccessful business venture or an unsuccesful technical endeavour that never offered a clear advantage to 3G users (something that QCOM can't control but can reasonably hope).  

You can see this while hearing QCOM execs labeling 4G as a pie in the sky, something no operator needs in the foreseable future, etc. The reality is that while betting on demand for higher speeds it's always a safe bet, as long as there are no cost effective solutions for backhauling traffic for base stations with 100Mbps+ of aggregated bandwidth , 4G IS really a pie in the sky.  

And by the way... VoIP on mobile networks stinks!, no mobile broadband technology offers today reliable, standard QoS (packet priorization of course, but also decent delay times) and (more important) does not provide any cost advantage for operators to pass on to customers, so no operator is in a rush to migrate to a 100% IP network whatever the flavor.