Comment Re:IP (Score 1) 349
People should be more patient before blasting a company that has made many technological advances for our betterment.
Bullshit. American consumers owe them zero loyalty. Qualcomm has single-handedly done more to limit consumer choice and enable American carriers to rein in their customers and impose nearly complete vendor lock-in with phone hardware than any company in existence. Qualcomm is the reason why, up until a few months ago, it was LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a company like Sony to sell a carrier-agnostic phone capable of doing LTE on nominally-GSM carriers like T-Mobile and AT&T. Why? Qualcomm refused to license radio-modem firmware to manufacturers, and only allowed it to be licensed by carriers. So, as a manufacturer, you were stuck... if you wanted your phone to do LTE on AT&T, you had to actively involve AT&T in its licensing... and by definition, that phone would be locked to AT&T, even if it had hardware technically capable of doing LTE on T-Mobile. Or 1700MHz HSPA+, for that matter. Likewise, if you wanted your phone to do LTE on T-Mobile, you HAD to get T-Mobile to deal with Qualcomm... and the resulting phones would be locked to T-Mobile and restricted to firmware that refused to operate on AT&T's LTE frequencies.
Yes, CDMA was a wonderful invention that ultimately determined the future direction of GSM (even if "IS95/CDMA-2000" itself fell out of favor in most places) by becoming the modulation method used for GSM 3G (HSPA+ is basically CDMA2000-1xRTT, extended to use multiple carriers with wider bandwidth, then further extended to allow one phone to simultaneously connect to two or more towers and split the traffic between them.)
By the same logic, we should be even MORE grateful to the Soviet engineers who developed the first mobile phone system based on CDMA back in the 1960s. Google "Altai". All Qualcomm did was make it commercially viable in the US & convince Sprint it was technologically superior to GSM (which, in fact, it was).