LTE silicon prices need to be driven down quickly if LTE is to enjoy a faster market adoption than 3G, according to Craig Miller, vice president for marketing and development at Sequans, speaking at the Globalpress Summit Conference in Santa Cruz today.
"The reason why 3G is not such a consumer technology as it should be is because of the cost of the technology", said Miller, adding, "LTE prices need to be driven down."
Asked why 3G was so expensive, Miller pointed to the licensing and royalty costs involved in 3G. Qualcomm’s domination of the CDMA standard played a big part in creating that situation.
Sequans is making Wimax and TD-LTE chips, the latter for the China market.
While Sequans sees Wimax as a 10m unit market this year, it sees LTE as ‘a work in progress’. "These things never ever happen as quickly as the pundits expect them to happen," said Miller, "there are devices out there but they are ‘make it work kind of devices, not make it work well kind of devices’. Inter-operability is complex; the operators don’t have spectrum yet."
So Miller does not expect LTE device shipments to overtake Wimax device shipments until 2013. However, it is sampling LTE silicon and some of its Wimax silicon is in the recently launched Sprint/HTC Evo Android-based 4G handset.
Asked how a 180 employee, 6 year-old start-up could compete with Qualcomm and ST-Ericsson in the LTE market, Miller replied: "The high-end, multi-mode handset is the domain of Qualcomm and ST-Ericsson, we’re not going head-to-head with them in that market, we’ll focus on the data-centric type of applications."