Standards are proliferating so fast in the wireless industry that no one company will be able in future to dominate a generation, according to Petri Liuha, laboratory director computation structures at Nokia, speaking to the International Electronics Forum 2008 in Dubai this morning.

Asked by EW if he thought Qualcomm would dominate the 4G generation is the same way as it dominated the 3G generation, Liuha joked: “Good question; next question please”.

He continued: “No we don’t expect that. We don’t want that to happen. The development of these generations on the mobile phone is like computers in the early days, at some time you don’t talk about generations.”

Liuha added: “Many technologies will be used, and it will be very difficult for anyone to dominate.”

Nokia has been involved in an epic series of lawsuits with Qualcomm which have mostly been consolidated into a single action to be decided by a Delaware court in July, if agreement is not reached before then.

Nokia believes that Qualcomm has overcharged for licenses for its CDMA technology after the wireless industry agreed to adopt CDMA on FRAND terms, i.e. that it would be licensed on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

Subsequently, Qualcomm’s efforts to find anyone in the industry to accept its proposal for a 4G technology standard called UMB, have proved unsuccessful.

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