* Will Qualcomm patents control future carrier services?
At a meeting last week of the Churchill Club – a Silicon Valley business and technology forum – someone half-jokingly asked if Qualcomm was purchasing wireless LAN chipset maker AirGo Networks “to stop WiMAX in its tracks.”
The forum had hosted a panel event to discuss WiMAX’s outlook for enabling next-generation broadband services. Qualcomm, the CDMA/WCDMA cellular pioneer and patent-holder, announced its intention to acquire AirGo on Dec. 3 and was represented on the panel.
Qualcomm indeed may be attempting to pile up the patents on next-generation broadband wireless technologies. In January, it completed its acquisition of Flarion, holder of a portfolio of intellectual property on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) access technology, a sophisticated wireless modulation technique.
For its part, AirGo is a pioneer in multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) “smart antenna” technology and holds several MIMO-related patents. Along with OFDM modulation, MIMO forms the basis for the forthcoming 802.11n standard, expected to boost Wi-Fi performance by 2 to 10 times.
And WiMAX also makes use of OFDM and smart antenna technologies. Are you getting the picture? Qualcomm, with patents in CDMA, WCDMA, OFDM, and MIMO, could potentially be calling the next-generation mobile broadband shots.
Ronny Haraldsvik, vice president of broadband marketing at Qualcomm, said simply that “Qualcomm already had its own OFDM answer to WiMAX” before the Flarion acquisition.
Then, panelist Bin Shen, vice president of broadband at Sprint Nextel, was asked whether Sprint committed to deploying WiMAX so it would no longer have to pay CDMA licensing fees to Qualcomm. Shen sidestepped the question by noting that with its major 2.5 GHz spectrum holdings in North America, it was extremely well positioned for deploying WiMAX (which is certainly true). Raghu Rau, a senior vice president at wireless equipment giant Motorola, however, nodded his head and acknowledged that the royalties were an issue.
If you’ve been around long enough to remember Token Ring and Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) LANs, you’ll recall how having to pay royalties to token-passing technology inventor Olof Soderblom aided in the demise of those technologies. Will Qualcomm similarly hold equipment makers and carriers hostage?
