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VIEWPOINT: UNANSWERED QUESTION

I need your help.

The next few weeks at RCR and everywhere else in the wireless industry are going to be crazy. It’s too late to try to clean off my desk, but I’d like to be able to file away some questions that keep bouncing around my brain. Nevertheless, I can’t really find satisfactory answers to these issues.

Since everyone knows wireless telecom people are famous for “thinking outside the box” and all those other crafty attributes, maybe you can come up with answers for these questions:

Who owns intellectual property rights to various 3G CDMA-based proposals? Qualcomm says it does. Ericsson says Qualcomm doesn’t. ETSI recognizes that Qualcomm has some IPRs, the question is whether they are “key.” InterDigital “doesn’t wish to comment” on 3G.

And speaking of 3G, was Ericsson’s CEO really misquoted in Japanese press, where he said the company was willing to compromise on licensing 3G technology from Qualcomm, or was Ericsson at one point willing to compromise, or is it really that “Sven-Christer Nilsson is an optimist and therefore hopes that Ericsson can reach an amicable solution both for the standards and the IPR issue in further talks,” as Ericsson says?

Why is it impossible to reach a technical compromise of the digital wiretap act of 1994? For goodness sakes, this argument is taking place in the same town where Republicans and Democrats a few years ago agreed to balance the budget.

I keep hearing so many companies are financially walking a tightrope, stocks are down, down, down, and yet industry shows keep getting bigger and more and more industry conferences are announced. What’s up with that?

When is mobile data actually going to become an industry?

If everyone keeps saying paging is going to die, how come it hasn’t?

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