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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 2brasil who wrote (11112)	6/4/1998 11:51:00 AM
From: Caxton Rhodes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Qualcomm Holds 3G to Ransom ISSUEÿ#24ÿÿÿTUESDAY 01 JUNE 1998 By Jeremy Scott-Joynt QualComm has thrown the argument over harmonizing third generation mobile air interfaces into disarray by announcing that it will keep its intellectual property to itself unless IMT-2000, the International Telecommunication Union¬s planned third generation mobile standard, is backwards compatible with cdmaOne networks. The company says it has been in discussions with the European Telecoms Standards Institute and the vendors behind wideband CDMA, the air interface proposed as the successor to GSM, about trying to bridge the gap between W-CDMA and its own 3G candidate, wideband cdmaOne. But a company spokesman said ETSI¬s rules had forced the organization into simply accepting or rejecting W-CDMA as it stands, at a point where existing cdmaOne operators would be effectively disenfranchised. "They said their regulations meant we could only answer yes or no, not maybe. We had to choose no," the spokesman said. With submissions for IMT-2000 due by the end of this month, the spokesman said QualComm had decided to force the pace, based on its belief that it holds IPR without which W-CDMA, as designed by NTT DoCoMo, Nokia and Ericsson, cannot go ahead. As a result, QualComm now says that if a converged solution, which provides backwards compatibility and a clear evolutionary path for both cdmaOne and GSM, can be found, it will indeed license its IPR as is customary at "fair, reasonable and equitable" royalty rates, which it characterizes as low single-digit percentages. If not, then it will only allow IPR access for wideband cdmaOne - and this, said the spokesman, would effectively torpedo W-CDMA. "Our contention is that W-CDMA cannot go forward without out IPR, given that we have essential IPR for the proposed specification," he said. "There's no reason for us not to license the IPR in a very reasonable way, if we can agree on some very basic and easy implementation issues." The saga over harmonizing the two CDMA-based 3G implementations began soon after the ETSI Special Mobile Group meeting in Paris which confirmed W-CDMA as the air interface for European 3G, known as the universal mobile telecoms system (UMTS). At that time, DoCoMo made it clear that it, along with 16 Asian GSM operators, would follow the same path, ensuring a single compatible standard across most of Asia and Europe. But W-CDMA would be unuseable in large portions of the US, where cdmaOne is making the greatest headway in the digital market, unless the two standards could somehow be converged. Both ETSI and the three W-CDMA pioneers have insisted they are keen to see a single global 3G air interface standard if at all possible. But they have consistently said that the main sticking point - a change in the chip rate from 4.095MHz to 3.6864MHz - would result in a drastic drop in performance. Nevertheless, QualComm says that without such a shift, backwards compatibility would be unachievable, rendering much of its work on cdmaOne worthless. Furthermore, QualComm now claims that some of the vendors backing work on W-CDMA are intentionally blocking the path to convergence for competitive reasons, in the hope of shutting out the cdmaOne operators and vendors altogether.