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To: Clarksterh who wrote (11250)	6/8/1998 2:34:00 AM
From: Caxton Rhodes	Respond to of 152472

This may have already been posted: NTT DoCoMo's 3G Plans Still on Hold By Jeremy Scott-Joynt at CommunicAsia 98, Singapore 03-JUN-98 NTT DoCoMo's efforts to broker an international third-generation mobile standard remained in limbo yesterday (3 June) as the U.S. proponent of cdmaOne, Qualcomm Inc., stuck to its threat not to share its intellectual property rights (IPR) unless wideband CDMA, Europe and Japan's proposed 3G air interface, is made backwards compatible with cdmaOne networks. Qualcomm has been in talks with DoCoMo and the European Telecoms Standards Institute (ETSI) about how to bridge the gap between W-CDMA, proposed as the successor to GSM, and its own 3G candidate, wideband cdmaOne. And, according to a report in CommunicationsWeek International, the company told ETSI in April it will not share its IPRs without cdmaOne backwards compatibility. A Qualcomm spokesman said ETSI's rules had forced the San Diego, California-based company into simply accepting or rejecting W-CDMA as it stands, effectively disenfranchising existing cdmaOne operators. "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 the International Telecommunication Union's IMT-2000 3G project due by the end of this month, he said Qualcomm had decided to force the pace. Unless a converged solution, offering backwards compatibility and a clear evolutionary path for both cdmaOne and GSM, is agreed, Qualcomm will only allow IPR access for wideband cdmaOne. "Our contention is that W-CDMA cannot go forward without our IPR, given that we have essential IPR for the proposed specification," he said. The spokesman further claimed that some W-CDMA pioneers were deliberately blocking the path to convergence for competitive reasons, in the hope of shutting out cdmaOne altogether. An NTT DoCoMo official agreed that today's W-CDMA specification probably relies on Qualcomm's intellectual property. He said DoCoMo was in monthly dialog with Qualcomm via ETSI meetings, which DoCoMo attends on a rapporteur basis. "We are having very great problems with Qualcomm," he said. "So we are talking to our partners about other methods of designing W-CDMA which do not involve Qualcomm intellectual property." Sweden's Ericsson was more forthright in its response to Qualcomm's move. "If they're threatening us, that is not the way to go," said Dr. Hakan Andersson, director of industry relations, Asia-Pacific, for Ericsson Radio Systems. "In any case, we have our own court battle with Qualcomm, because we believe they have infringed our IPR on their solution to soft hand-over problems." Andersson added that ETSI has now reached an agreement with the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium, the lobby group representing U.S. TDMA - or IS-136 - operators and vendors, to converge their 3G work. Since IS-136 and cdmaOne both use the IS-41 network architecture, ETSI's move would suggest that even cdmaOne operators could move to W-CDMA instead of wideband cdmaOne if they so wished, Andersson said. Europe's first high speed cellular trial will start this year in Dusseldorf, Germany when operators Mannesmann Mobilefunk BmbH and T-Mobil GmbH are scheduled to test Ericsson AB's Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) phones and infrastructure. The next generation wideband system will allow on-the-move high-speed access to the Internet and other services as well as voice. The companies say other interested parties will also be invited to participate in the trial project.