David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I think just to pause and reflect, big innovation going from maybe 20x, 30x, 50x, you get a lot more capacity by saying instead of just one person gets a frequency at any given time, you now get a whole bunch of people who can use that frequency because the signal is digital because of time division. This is the movement from frequency division multiple access, FDMA to time division multiple access or TDMA. It's actually at 30, 50. Maybe now that kind of is, but back then it was 3x-5x. Really, I think the right analogy is it is time sharing. Timesharing is what it is. It's kind of like the old computing model of time sharing on a teletype on a mainframe. That's what's going on here. Yup. Over to Qualcomm, they're thinking about doing this satellite communication thing. Remember, Irwin studied with Claude Shannon. He's always thinking about what is the most efficient way to use all the way up to the theoretical limit of how much signal can be communicated in a given medium at a given time. He's sort of looking at TDMA and they're like, ah, I think there's something even more efficient than this, and we need something more efficient than this for this satellite network.…

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