Mannerisms

By not joining a consortium for the fair cross-licensing of 4G IP, the San Diego company could be giving notice that they intend to do to the wireless industry at 4G what they tried to do at 3G.

But, according to Europe’s leading semiconductor analysts, Future Horizons: “You only get one chance to screw the industry.”

So Qualcomm could be being a little ambitious.

At NXP, now joined with STMicroelectronics in a wireless joint venture, the head of business development, Theo Claasen reckons: "These things that can only be done once. Europe has seen what happens when Qualcomm is allowed to have a dominant position in a technology. Qualcomm is not the most beloved company in the industry becasue of its aggressive stance on IP. It has less IP in 4G than in 3G and our new company has a good opportunity to be a powerful force."

Seven wireless infrastructure suppliers, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC, NextWave Wireless, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sony Ericsson have signed an agreement for the fair cross-licensing of IP they collectively own in building new LTE equipment and standards. The seven will probably provide more hand-sets and base stations than the rest of the industry combined.

The agreement signed by the seven, states that, for LTE in handsets, a reasonable royalty level is a single-digit percentage of the sales price. For LTE in notebooks, the agreement suggests a single-digit dollar amount.

Qualcomm isn’t the only wireless chip company not to have signed up to the agreement. TI, ST/NXP, Broadcom, Mediatek, Infineon and Freescale are similarly absent.

Still, the agreement signed by the seven is open to anyone else who wants to get involved, and Qualcomm could have signed up if it so wished, and its public statements suggest that it thought about doing so, and decided not to.

So it looks as if the San Diego-ites are putting the wireless community on notice that, at the 4G generation, they intend to be poachers rather than gamekeepers.

In any attempt to do with LTE, what it tried to do with CDMA, Qualcomm would, presumably, be relying on the LTE patents it acquired with its takeover of Flarion.

So Flarion's patents are under considerable scrutiny by the wireless community.

The wireless community will look awfully silly if they get screwed twice.