Earlier this month, a report by Matt Lewis of the telecoms analyst company, ARCchart concluded that UMB, the 4G telecommunications standard proposed by Qualcomm, is unlikely to see the light of day.
“The reality is that LTE and mobile WiMAX have stolen a huge lead on UMB and even though none of these technologies are as yet fully commercial (WiMAX probably being the closest)”, says Lewis’ report, “CDMA operators realise that committing to UMB would be suicidal while their competitors are able to enjoy the economies of scale achieved when LTE and WiMAX go mass-market. This is not an insignificant effect – 3G Node-B prices have plummeted 50% in three years owing to the extensive rollout of the technology.”
Lewis concludes: “Therefore, it is unlikely that UMB will see the commercial light of day.”
Many people in the telecommunications industry feel that Qualcomm shot itself in the foot by charging too much for royalties and licence fees for CDMA technology used in the wireless networks at the 3G generation.
In return for the industry adopting CDMA-based technologies, Qualcomm had agreed to license its technology on fair reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
What followed were, what the industry regards as, extortionate demands for fees and royalties which have led to an investigation into Qualcomm by the EC, and multiple legal actions in multiple countries.
So when it came to choosing the standard for the 4G generation. rather than repeat the legal and financial misery which accompanied 3G, the industry have turned away from Qualcomm’s proposed standard UMB.
As Malcolm Penn, CEO of Europe’s leading semiconductor analyst company, Future Horizons, puts it: “You only get one chance to screw the industry”.
You'd have thought that nice Dr Sanjay Jha, COO of Qualcomm, who was educated in England and has common sense as well as brains, would have beaten some sense into those San Diego heads by now.
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