LogOn: Qualms about Qualcomm
by Kevin Fitchard
TelecomClick, Mar 5 2001
CANNES, FRANCE--No matter what you think of Qualcomm, you have to admit this company has big brass ones. The way the San Diego CDMA king gets under peoples skin is almost admirable. Whether it's Qualcomm’s bluster, the company’s smug sense of self-importance, or its marketing crew’s insistence that the company name be spelled in all caps (I still refuse), the company has a way of bugging the hell out of anyone that doesn’t agree entirely with its vision of a wireless future.
Every year, Qualcomm sends out its HDR Gestapo to the GSM World Congress in Cannes to rant and rave about the wonders of code division multiple access in all of its evolutions. Sure, Qualcomm has some apparently legitimate reasons for being there. They have a booth. They give demos of their new technologies. They schmooze with the delegates. But those aren’t the real reasons Qualcomm attends each year. No, they come to spoil the party.
Like the little boy in the back of the room trying to get everyone’s attention, Qualcomm jumps up and down at the World Congress reminding anyone who’ll listen (and screaming at everyone who won’t) that 3G is a CDMA technology, not a GSM technology. The Qualcomm folks and CDMA’s cheerleading squad, the CDG, never get tired of pointing out that it's called Wideband CDMA (W-CDMA), not Wideband GSM, no matter how much Europe tries to roll it up in fancy acronyms like UMTS.
This year, Qualcomm decided to really turn the screws. CEO Irwin Jacobs flew into the French Riviera to hold a press conference right in the GSM Association’s back yard. The topic of the press conference? Only that UMTS and W-CDMA deployments are being delayed due to numerous problems, but (surprise, surprise) cdma2000 deployments are right on track.
How do you them apples, GSMA? Now where are all the parties?
But probably the most frustrating thing industry’s about the Qualcomm army–probably the thing that makes them the biggest pain in the ass–is their annoying tendency to be right. After all, 1x is being deployed in U.S. and Korea while GSM carriers are wrestling with GPRS and EDGE. While GSM carriers are having to deploy packet backbones, CDMA carriers are just upgrading their software.
Just look Qualcomm and the CDG’s favorite punching bag, the UWCC. After years of harassing and cajoling the TDMA group and its membership, the association amazingly fell to its knees when AT&T Wireless announced it was abandoning the TDMA-EDGE migration path and switching to GSM to follow the full bore ITU evolution to W-CDMA. Cingular, the nation’s biggest TDMA carrier, is expected to follow suit this year.
While these decisions have nothing to do Qualcomm, the company couldn’t help but lob an “I told ya so” in AT&T’s face. Qualcomm issued a congratulatory statement–the industry equivalent of a fruit basket–applauding AT&T on its decision to go the W-CDMA route. Not surprisingly, AT&T didn’t respond, except for a few muddled and unpublishable remarks from the public relations desk.
To be fair, Qualcomm has mellowed in last year. Realizing that it won’t conquer the world by cramming cdma2000 down people’s throats, the company and the CDG have adopted a "W-CDMA good--cdma2000 still better" attitude. After all, Qualcomm still makes money from every W-CDMA system built, just not as much money. Maybe the company is maturing as it gets older–abandoning the fire and vitriol that characterized its formative years.
Ironically, as CDMA gets bigger, Qualcomm itself gets smaller. It has shed most of its manufacturing divisions–network infrastructure to Ericsson, handsets to Kyocera. And there's also a planned spin-off of the chipset division.
You don’t have to be big to be loud, though. In the years to come, I can imagine Qualcomm as nothing more than a one-man office in San Diego, with Irwin Jacobs still screaming about the virtues of CDMA while perched atop a file cabinet full of patents.
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