Lawmaker Urges U.S. Wireless Standard for Iraq
Thu Mar 27, 5:44 PM ET
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By Ben Berkowitz
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Even before U.S.-led troops begin the battle for Baghdad, a debate has begun over the wireless telephone standard that will be used in post-war Iraq (news - web sites), with a California congressman lobbying for hometown technology as a way to protect American jobs and profits.
Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from southern California, is urging the U.S. government to build from scratch a cellular network for relief efforts based on the CDMA (news - web sites) standard popularized by Qualcomm Inc. rather than the GSM standard, which dominates in Europe.
The move, which comes at a time of strained relations between the United States and allies France and Germany over the war, would ensure that royalties from the rebuilding effort flow back to U.S. companies, Issa said.
"If European GSM technology is deployed in Iraq, much of the equipment used to build the cell phone system would be manufactured in France, Germany, and elsewhere in western and northern Europe," Issa said in an open letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Wendy Chamberlain, an administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Issa went on to suggest that American jobs would be at stake, depending on which system the government chooses.
"Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depend on the success of U.S.-developed wireless technologies like CDMA," he said in the letter sent on Wednesday and posted on his Web site. "If the U.S. government deploys U.S.- developed CDMA in Iraq, then American companies will manufacture most of the necessary equipment here in the United States and benefit from the associated royalties."
One of Issa's biggest corporate donors is San Diego-based Qualcomm, which owns substantially all the patents on the other primary technology for wireless communications, known as Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA.
EASE OF SPYING?
Issa told Reuters in a phone interview Thursday that as far as he had been able to gather, the government's primary reason for favoring the Groupe Speciale Mobile, or GSM, standard for Iraq may have to do with a perceived ease of spying on GSM networks.
"GSM is easy to eavesdrop on, and the Secretary of State proved it very easily when he played all those conversations with the Iraqi leadership that they had recorded," Issa said. "I personally believe that this was a decision of single-purpose convenience."
Issa, who said 50 other members of the Congress have co-signed his letter, took pains to note that his request was not born of any anti-European sentiment.
"The real question is not anti-French, its pro-American dollars," he said. "It is also about the U.S. Government ... in a sense preferring a standard to the detriment of the U.S. standard."
The world's largest makers of GSM equipment include Sweden's Ericsson (news - web sites) and Finland's Nokia (news - web sites), as well as France's Alcatel, Germany's Siemens AG (news - web sites), Canada's Nortel Networks Corp. and Lucent Technologies Inc. of the United States.
Some of those companies have U.S. operations, but Issa argued that more jobs would be created by using technology where the intellectual property is owned domestically.
Issa, a former captain in the U.S. Army, where he commanded a tank platoon, is also prominent in the Arab-American community, having served as president of the American Task Force for Lebanon. A Jewish Defense League member, Earl Krugel, pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy and weapons charges stemming from a plot to blow up a mosque and Issa's offices.
Between October 2001 and October 2002, Qualcomm's political action committee donated $5,500 to Issa's campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission (news - web sites), making the company one of his 10 largest donors outside individuals.
A Qualcomm spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment.
Issa said that while Qualcomm has been responding to his staff's research inquiries they were not behind his letter.
"Most of the research that has been done has been completely independent of them and rightfully so," he said. "It happens that the A-prime beneficiary would be Qualcomm, though Qualcomm does not make infrastructure or handsets." |
