Mannerisms

Seeing the other guy screw up is always a pleasure so it was good last week to see the truly awful state of the US wireless telephone network in Arizona.

Whether you got to finish your call was problematical. Much of the time there was no coverage at all. The networks are grim in Europe. In Arizona they’re 3X grimmer. Arizona’s big, but it’s in the world’s richest country. It can afford a decent wireless network.

“I am amazed that they (network operators in general) get by with such a poor quality of service,” says Michel Mayer, CEO of Freescale Semiconductor, “it’s difficult to imagine video to the phone when so many voice calls lose their connection.”

But fly for a couple of hours Westward from the dropped calls of Arizona and you find the boys of Silicon Valley happily designing chips and technologies for sending video over the mobile networks.

Is anyone really going to watch TV on their mobile phone? Those little TVs from Casio have been on shop shelves for 30 years but they haven’t exactly taken the world by storm.

Although Freescale is the dominant supplier of DVB-H RF tuners, Sandeep Chennakeshu, senior vice president of the wireless and mobile systems group, says “I really find it difficult to believe I’ll watch TV on a little screen. But the behaviour of the younger generation is so very different.”

If the networks were robust, and if mobile phones had a roll-out screen stretching to six inches on the diagonal, then TV to the handset has a chance.

But the world’s laboratories have given up speculating on when the roll-able screen will be with us. And the record of the operators in investing in their networks is such that few people expect the networks to become robust anytime soon.

The teenagers may take a different view.

Paranoia corner

Has anyone else come across the phenomenon that, where there’s a paid WiFi connection, the free connections don’t work?

Going through San Jose airport in October, there were about half a dozen network providers, one of which was free. I connected to all the others in turn but was unable to get onto the Web.

Connect up to the paid network and, hey presto, I was able to access anything I wanted..

I’ve noticed the same phenomenon at Munich and other European airports. There are some free networks, you can connect to them, but they don’t then connect you to the Web. Have the pay-for guys somehow managed to scupper the free networks?

The situation is quite different at some airports like the Phoenix Skyport and Budapest where free WiFi is ubiquitous and, as soon as you switch on your laptop, the connected signal is blinking away.

The great hope for WiFi was that it would become the ‘Peoples’ Telephony’ with local authorities, libraries, airports, museums, publicly-minded commercial corporations, hotels, bookshops, cafes etc etc providing the service for free.

Pity if it gets wrapped up into a cellular add-on service.

When your boss says: ‘Here’s your Blackberry’ do you:

a) Blush with pleasure and mumble your thanks?
b) Wonder if you’ll be able to work it?
c) Ask for a pay-rise?

The right answer is c).

‘Here’s your Blackberry’ really means: ‘Your customers can now reach you 24/7’.

Instead of working a 40 hour week you’re now on-call 168 hours a week. That deserves a mega pay-raise

I have to say I love the sound of Xg Technology whose shares started trading in London today.

Xg boasts an outrageously ambitious technology with the potential to wipe out the established wireless telecommunications industry and provide free, or almost free, telephony for everyone.

It’s like the promise of the PC to ‘democratise the computer industry’. And the PC did just that, wiping out a raft of huge computer companies like Burroughs, Wang, DEC, etc.

XMAX, the name for Xq’s technology, claimed to be able to build a pan-US VOIP wireless network for just $15m. Wow!

However not everything was good about Xg. Requests to talk to senior management were refused. The workings of the technology were never explained. Previous ventures by the founders had ended messily.

Today, Xg’s shares started started trading on the London AIM stock exchange after an inauspicious roadshow.

They’d come to London hoping to raise £30m which would have valued the company at £400m, and in fact raised nothing. During the road show of potential investors, the company learned that there was no interest in investing at that level.

But they got their listing, and some of their seed investors sold their shares at $4.50 a pop and that put a value of $287m on the company.

Nonetheless potential investors gave the company non-binding expressions of interest in buying £63m worth of convertible preference shares.

I like the sound of Xq because it’s claiming to be able to do something so totally revolutionary in an age when all the new companies seem to offer only incremental improvements to what is currently on offer.

But now I can actually buy shares in the company, would I do so? Would you? OK, it sounds too good to be true, and that means it usually is.

But Intel set out to reduce the cost of computer memory by 100X. That sounded too good to be true. But they did it.

An excellent question was asked at the Silicon South-West meeting last week.

“How many people have got a Bluetooth pairing to work which wasn’t a pairing between an earpiece and a mobile phone?” asked Peter Gardner, technology sector head for wireless communications at 3i, the venture capital house.

Out of the audience of a hundred people involved in the wireless industry, one of which was the CTO of the No.1 Bluetooth player CSR, only five put up their hands, and Gardner seemed surprised it was as many as that.

One of the odd things about life today is that people are so afraid of being thought to be technologically incompetent that they’d rather admit to having a sexually transmitted disease than that they can’t get a consumer electronics product to work.

If only people spoke up more often about the difficulties of getting stuff to work, then manufacturers would be pressured to make products more straightforward, and people like me would stop feeling so ruddy inadequate.

Bumped into Rodger Sykes last week. The former President and CEO of parallel processing specialists Picochip, and the co-founder and CEO of powerline start-up SiConnect, is President and CEO of MMIC solutions based in Malvern.

He said that everything he told me about MMIC solutions was off the record, but the web-site for the company gives a flavour.

‘The focus of MMIC solutions activity is advanced mm wave chip sets and modules for frequencies ranging from 35GHz to 110GHz. . . . . . . . . .MMIC solutions technology massively reduces development and manufacturing costs to finally bring these frequencies into commercial exploitation.’

Sykes sees the revolution in the UK electronics industry in the last 25 years, which has seen the disappearance of the large companies like GEC, Ferranti, STC, Plessey, Thorn and Marconi, as being very positive for the start up scene in terms of making engineers willing to risk working for start-ups.

In the old days it was almost impossible getting an engineer to leave one of the big companies to join a start-up.

Now the UK attitude is much more Silicon Valley though, on the Continent, things haven’t changed so much.

Hermann Hauser, founder of Acorn Computers and Amadeus Capital Ventures, describes the contrast this way: In Germany, if you’re an engineer working for Siemens and say you’re going to join a start-up, your girl-friend will ditch you; in California, your girl-friend will ditch you if you’re an engineer with a big company and turn down the opportunity to join a start-up..

Oh, by the way, watch out for MMIC solutions in Q1 2007. The first product could be coming out around about then.

There’s glaciers, tortoises, and BT’s speed of execution. The snail-like pace of BT's move to a new television age is shown by its launch today of a TV service.

Is there really global frequency support for WiMAX? There is disagrement between Intel and the venture capital group 3i over that.

What a difference genius can make. Thirty billion quid in one case. Hutchison has spawned two wireless flops in the UK and one stupendous success. Was genius the ingredient which made Orange a success but was lacking in Rabbit and 3?

UK Trade Minister Margaret Hodge has vetoed a measure by an EU Commissioner to put a limit to roaming charges putting the interests of operators before those of consumers.

Xg Technology, the controversial Florida wirless company with a potentially revolutionary technology, plans a massive commercial roll-out starting in a couple of months.

Samsung Electronics' CEO Joong-Yong Yun says the company is focusing on low-end phones because the demand for low-end is much stronger than for high-end. Does this mean that the mobile phone has stopped adding functionality?

The world may see Goldman’s bonuses as the epitome of capitalism, but earlier this week a bit of capitalism British-style warmed the cockles of the heart.

Philips Group spin-off Polymer Vision plans to have a product with a rollable display on the market by the end of 2007. Will the technology trigger a huge boost in mobile Internet applications?

It’s bad luck, but probably inevitable, that Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) finds itself in the unpleasant position that three of its customers for Bluetooth chips, Nokia, Samsung and Matsushita, are being sued by a US body called WRF Capital for infringing patents.

To be honest, Nokia’s would-be RAZR-killer did not look much of a beast at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Wireless data rates are rarely what they're said to be, and, as wireless moves into the consumer space, the products have to be a lot more straightforward about what they claim to be capable of doing.

First port of call on the way back from CES, via a stop-off for some sun and sand, was the mobile phone store for a new phone.

Maybe there's a connection between the lower margins on wireless chip-sets reported by STMicrolectronics and Texas Instruemtns this week, and those guys who fiddle with their mobile phones throughout plane trips, train journeys, meetings, trips to the loo and restaurant meals.

Mrs Thatcher and my pub landlord must be right, my new 3G phone has to go back to the store.

Beware of great products. They could imperil your company. Poor old Motorola is now under threat from corporate raider Carl Icahn, veteran of takeovers at Texaco and TWA, who is now demanding a seat on the Motorola board after buying 1.4 per cent of the company’s shares.
No one thinks he'll stop there.

Today’s technology products can make you feel such a clot it is a fantastic relief when a top-flight techie admits he can’t make his phone work.

A couple of weeks ago we heard the CFOs of Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics bemoan the trend of demand going towards the low-end mobile phone rather than the high-end, however other leading lights in the industry welcome the move.

Seven years on from when Vodafone paid six billion quid for its 3G licence, the company is only getting 10 per cent of its revenues from 3G, according to Vodafone’s CEO Arun Sarin.

Arriving here in Nuremberg for the Embedded World shindig I get to the hotel and check out (as you do these days) the data connections.

Is 3G a failed technology? What seems like an outrageous question becomes ask-able when 3G is accounting for a small portion of telecoms operators’ revenues, when its achieved data rates are pathetically less than touted, and when WIMAX, with its vastly greater data rate, is already being deployed in Asia and will shortly be hitting Europe.

Why is Blackberry the only company in the world with a decent portable email terminal? And why is the iPod out-selling every other MP3 player?

David vs Goliath is a favourite type of story and a fine example of one is shaping up in the Hamble, the sailing Mecca on the South Coast, where a little company, with a unique technology, is squaring up to the mighty Apple and its iconic CEO Steve Jobs.

It’s a fine thing this 3G. My new phone let’s me access http://news.bbc.co.uk from my foreign breakfast table, and it allows me to get my laptop on-line using the phone as a modem, when WiFi and Ethernet aren’t available. But God does it cost.

The pestilence of roaming charges may soon be gone forever. The evil practice of charging tourists both an extortionate fee to make a call, and an extortionate fee to receive a call, could be killed off this year as affordable voice over WiFi phones hit the market.

Over to America, and the first thing I do on arriving is to switch phones. Although I now have a super-duper quadband, 3G, leading-edge mobile phone, I refuse to pay the rip-off roaming charges. So I switch to my cheapo, $40, US-registered phone on which the calls cost a third as much. Welcome to the wacky world of wireless.

One of the fundamental problems of the electronics industry, why stuff doesn't work, was addressed during a panel session at the Globalpress Summit Conference in a rainy Monterey yesterday.

It's so nice to go from a third world wireless network to a first world one.

China appears to be following a subtle strategy in its approach to 3G licensing. A general expectation has been created that 3G will be available for next year's Olympic Games.

To be positioned for three of the hottest chip markets in the world could be luck, but it's more likely to be because you've got a very generic chip.

A nice alternative meaning to the acronym GSM is given at the UK launch of the Swedish company Rebtel ('the mobile Skype') which has a wheeze for using your domestic mobile credits, which come as part of your monthly package, to pay for international calls at domestic rates.

Hands up those who think Near Field Communications technology will take over from cash in the next five years. Could 2,600 years of cash usage be wiped out by 802.16?

Interesting to hear Sprint say that its multi-billion dollar investment in Wimax in North America is being driven by user-generated content.

Suddenly the home base station market is being seen as a big deal as network operators start looking at it as a way to protect them from the likely ravages into their revenues caused by VOIP over WiFi.

It's good to see Intel being useful. It was useful in the 1970s in getting MOS memory to work and commercialising microprocessors, the combination of which democratised the computer. Now we all have one.

The wireless telecommunications industry is used to having design centres in Sophia Antipolis, Austin, Grenoble or Kista, but LG's mobile operation has set up a design centre in Milan, hardlly a venue renowned for high-tech talent.

Ouch. My first bill since having a 3G phone comes in. It is a horrendous £157.44p.
It's split into calls made while abroad, picture messaging and enhanced WAP.

Good news for Quantum Research of Southampton, is that Apple could be wanting even more of QR's touch sensor technology, if an influential industry analyst is to be believed.

After 22 years of stonking growth, Vodafone is acknowledging that the wireless telecommunications industry has run out of steam.

June is the date when the European parliament decides on roaming charges. Should they be capped or not?

Fortuitously, a number of technologies, including four-bit-per-cell flash memory, integrated RF/baseband chips and single-chip NOR/NAND combinations, are coming to fruition to help drive down the cost of mobile phones, just when low-cost is needed.

Are you going to make a single chip phone solution? There are only three possible answers to this question: 'Yes', 'No', and 'Maybe'. Below is STMicroelectronics' answer to the question:

Paul Dal Santo, vice president and general manager of AMD's Handheld Division, came out with a cracking quote yesterday.

The latest project being touted is a $10 cellphone, but, one wonders, isn't that already here or hereabouts?

Two wonderful pieces of news for mobile phone users are that the two bugbears of absurdly high Internet access and roaming charges are going to be cut.

Question: "Will you be putting an NFC die in your Bluetooth package to do the pairing?"
Answer: "For non-technical users we might".

It's odd that STMicroelectronics is still complaining about an 'unfavourable product mix within wireless'.

It's not often these days that a piece of silicon can deliver the WOW! factor and, before 12 months are out, we might be seeing it again.

If WiMAX is so much better than cellular 3G in delivering bandwidth for the buck, why aren't we going WiMAX for 4G? Answer: Legacy.

A week or so after arguing that the first piece of silicon which can function, successively, as multiple radios would have the WOW! Factor, it turns out that TechnoConcepts of Boston has come up with an evaluation platform which combines a re-configurable RF front-end with a pico-Chip array-of-DSPs reconfigurable baseband.

Half the iPod users in Europe are considering moving to the Apple iPhone as their next mobile phone, according to research from Canalys of Reading.

How soon will we be getting a mobile phone costing $10 to make and sell at a profit? This week Vodafone announced a $25 mobile phone.

Anxious to wean the best man off a natural obsession with logistics and timings at a recent wedding, I asked him (he's in the wireless industry) whether Wimax or cellular would be the dominant 4G technology.

There's always a bit of a thrill about a technology which threatens to be totally revolutionary, tearing up the established economic norms and making the established companies run for cover. Nowadays, it doesn't happen very often. So Xg Technology has a bit of a fascination for me.

If you buy your iPhone from Apple, today, you’re limited to two per person. If you buy it from AT&T you’re limited to one per person.

At last someone who has been high in the US telecommunications hierarchy, has spoken up about the lousy state of the US wireless networks. Even if his comments were self-serving.

One has to say, the rumoured, but so far denied, take over of Verizon is the best thing Arun Sarin could have come up with since he took over the Vodafone CEO-ship from Chris Gent.

Brilliant! Exactly what London needs. A free WiFi service opened this week for London. It is accessible for the 22 kilometre stretch of the Thames between Greenwich and Millbank.

The woes of Freescale in moving from a $260m profit in Q206 five months before it was taken over by private equity funds, to a $288m loss eight months after it was taken over by private equity, can partly be explained by Motorola’s struggles in the cellphone market where it has now conceded the No.2 spot to Samsung.

It looks as if Intel is trying to kill WiMAX by positioning it as an alternative to cable, 3G and DSL.

Now it’s Qualcomm which has been found guilty of concealing its patents from a standards-setting group.

Will Strauss at Forward Concepts makes an excellent point in his analysis of the Infineon acquisition of the LSI Logic wireless business that, thanks to LSI’s merger with Agere last year, the LSI mobile phone business had some 700 patents relating to UMTS technology plus many other patents owned by Agere as the heir to Bell Labs.

Some interesting comments came in from the US about the how the wireless scene looks over there. Apparently the cognoscenti are writing off UMTS and HSDPA because of lack of bandwidth (theoretical capacity 2Mbps, but 768Kbps in the real world, with 1.5Mbps bursts). So, while LTE might boost the technology in 2010, it’s going nowhere at the moment.

It seems that the manufacturers of mobile phones are beginning to take over from the wireless operators in getting consumers to buy services over the wireless networks.

Could Google’s GPhone be a Wimax/WiFi/3G/GSM phone|? After all, the GPhone needs GSM to be useful, 3G to be future-proof, Wimax to complement Google’s alliance with Sprint, and WiFi because, sometimes, it's free.

Autumn means the business traveling season starts up again, and it is becoming painfully clear that free WiFi access is becoming, like Alice’s Cheshire cat, a vanishing phenomenon.

Japan is to open up its wireless telecommunications network operator market to new carriers when it allocates licenses for 2.5GHz spectrum for Wimax services, later this year.

The Curse of the Wires. The Bane of the Boxes. The Misery of the Rat’s Nest. Whatever you like to call it, it’s practically over. Next year the box manufacturers start to put wireless USB interfaces in their products.

Scott McGregor, CEO of Broadcom, gave wireless chip rival Qualcomm a kicking on the opening day of the International System and SOC Conference in Prague today.

There is a communications cartel in the US, charging hhigh prices and thwarting innovation, and the organisation responsible for creating the cartel is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the nation’s telecoms regulator.

Broadcom and ST recently got the Big OK from Nokia to be chip suppliers; TI and Qualcomm felt the chill of a turned shoulder. Scott McGregor, CEO of Broadcom, tells how he did it.

The Google phone, GPhone, could be the golden key which unlocks the door of the mobile internet. A door which has been locked for much longer than anyone could have predicted.

Ericsson has now said in public what many have been saying in private for some time, that the mobile internet just hasn’t happened with no one finding a compelling application for mobile data services.

The Wimax people in the US seem to have gone haywire with Clearwire, the Craig McCaw-led, Intel and Motorola-backed, Wimax operator, launching aWimax access card for laptops which costs $60 a month plus a PC card lease fee of $6.99 a month.

Half of all mergers and acquisitions destroy shareholder value, according to Scott McGregor, CEO of Broadcom, which makes one or two acquisitions every quarter.

Ed Zander CEO of Motorola, tells USA Today that Motorola is “betting the farm” on Wimax. Can this be true?

Has Google been very clever with its GPhone strategy? Instead of a phone it’s produced an OS and hardware reference designs.

Are the Brits suckers? Today we find out. The iPhone hits stores at 6:02pm tonight. Who will pay £899 to buy and use an iPhone for a year?

Signalling a cooling of Sprint Nextel’s enthusiasm for Wimax, the company has ended its agreement to share its $5bn proposed Wimax network with the network being built by Clearwire, the Intel, Motorola, Samsung-backed network operator set up by wireless pioneer Craig McCaw.

UK iPhone sales were lousy, according to anecdotal evidence (Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse did not issue sales figures) showing that the Brits aren’t suckers, and that greed can kill off the most promising project.

Do you have problems with the data rate of WiFi? Does WiFi’s range annoy you? Would you pay money to get an increase in either? Or both? Well I know I wouldn’t.

Here we are, five days after the UK launch of the iPhone, and none of its three vendors, O2, Apple and Carphone Warehouse, has released sales figures.

The split between Sprint and Nextel which were putting together the world’s largest Wimax network in the US, is a blow for the future adoption of the technology, says Rene Penning de Vries, CTO of NXP Semiconductor.

Holy Grails are two a penny in the chip business from the the universal memory chip to the universal translator processor, but one Holy Grail, the single chip mobile phone with software defined radios putting a dozen standards and numerous frequencies on a handset, could be with us next year.

Anecdotal evidence from my local Carphone Warehouse suggests that UK iPhone sales have been stifled by the price.

Chatting to a Qualcomm guy I was asking why it is that they remain at legal and commercial loggerheads with the world’s largest hand-set producer, in theory their best potential customer.

I wonder what Steve Jobs is thinking about the German court order forcing T-Mobile to sell unlocked i-Phones.

With Verizon deciding to go to LTE, the European-developed standard, for 4G telephony, and Sprint-Nextel, and much of Asia, going for Wimax, it seems that Qualcomm could be squeezed out of the 4G equation.

It’s sad to see a high-tech legend reduced to silence. Well over a month after the UK iPhone launch, there are still no official sales figures

January’s US news won’t only be interesting for the Barack vs Hillary battles in Iowa and New Hampshire, but also for the results of the US auction of 700MHz wireless spectrum.

ARC could be coming into its own as the world wants reconfigurability for software defined silicon in wireless handsets.

The legal battles between Broadcom and Qualcomm look like rumbling on through 2008,
while Qualcomm struggles to find takers for its UMB 4G technology.

In a revealing insight into Qualcomm’s integrity, a US judge has asked the California Bar Association to investigate the conduct of six Qualcomm lawyers after behaviour, described by the judge, as ‘exceptional misconduct’.

For the developers of wireless technology the key questions are: What should we be putting in the mix? What connections do people want?

Maybe the US government won’t get as much as it was hoping to from this month’s auction of spectrum, which was expected to see non-traditional telecoms players like Google, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, get into the wireless telecoms business.

NXP Semiconductor reckons that GPS in cellphones is going to be a very big deal That’s why it bought fabless semiconductor GPS specialist company, GloNav, last month.

Hob-nobbing with Gordon Brown and Sir Richard Branson's trade mission to China, and scoffing a State Banquet in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last week, was Guillaume d’Eyssautier, CEO of PicoChip, who was in the country to announce the first PicoChip product to be developed entirely in China.

Jorma Ollila was the legendary CEO of Nokia who transformed it from a TV, logging and runbber boots company into the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile phones.

Nokia has whipped past the 40 per cent market share point, selling 437 million phones last year, which is almost as much as the combined total of its four biggest rivals, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG.

4G could change everything in the cellular infrastructure industry, as new technology suppliers, implementing new standards, enable new equipment suppliers.

Or indeed: Whether Wimax? The next week or so is expected to throw up the answer as to whether the US will deploy Wimax in a significant way.

The Mobile World Congress, though a wonderful party, showed an industry which is not, apparently, up to anything particularly innovative. The ten best products at the 2008 show in Barcelona last week were:

Qualcomm blew its chance of getting its 4G technology Ultra-Mobile Broadband (UMB) accepted by the telecoms industry by being too greedy at the 3G generation.

Earlier this week I was banging on about how Qualcomm’s extortionate and litigious attitude to royalty charges on CDMA had queered its chances of getting its 4G technology platform accepted.

According to Business Week, Motorola can’t get any interest in its cellphone division from potential trade buyers, so the only route open to Motorola is to spruce up the business to make it more valuable. Currently analysts are valuing it at $8 billion but, as its market share declines, so does the business’ value.

Believe it or not, China is said to be about to announce its 3G licences. This has been expected for about three years now. State radio is saying that the restructuring of the country’s telecoms industry might be announced in the next few weeks.

When Gordon Brown skinned the UK wireless operators in 2000, collecting £22.5 billion for 3G licences, the credit was given to a clever auction system in which bidders bid blind, and kept on bidding until they could bid no more.

Woz isn’t that impressed by the iPhone, it is reported by CNET, where the Apple co-founder expressed the view that it should have had 3G capability.

Wimax could be killed off by a report from the Satellite Users Interference Reduction Group (SUIRG) whjich states that Wimax interferes with satellite signals transmitted in the C-band frequency.

Here are the world's ten best manufacturers of mobile phones:

IP is becoming an increasingly divisive issue in the semiconductor industry with companies like Nokia and Qualcomm spending around $200 million each, every year, on lawyers to protect themselves from patent claims, or try to enforce patent claims on others.

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.

Vodafone expects to be deploying femtocells in its network, on a commercial basis, this year. Femtocells are low-cost basestations for 3G access, which are installed inside a home or an office to improve coverage and data rates.

Here in San Francisco at the Globalpress conference it became pretty clear that Wimax, in the US, is a dead duck.

The wireless business must be horrible. First, they say Freescale will flog its wireless business, then NXP flogs off its wireless business to STMicroelectronics.

A good laugh is to be had from three USA government guys moaning that Google manipulated the recent 700MHz spectrum auction.

Is Qualcomm throwing down the gauntlet to the world’s wireless industry on 4G?

Why is NXP putting its wireless business into a joint venture with STMicroelectronics, rather than selling the business outright?

The Suckers’ Phone, a.k.a the original 3G-less iPhone, was a total flop in Europe, according to the blog of Guy Kewney.

Hillary Clinton is making an impact on the semiconductor industry. Her ‘No Quitting’ stance has spread to Intel CEO Paul Otellini who, almost unbelievably, says Intel is still trying to get into the cellphone business.

Ever since we saw Bernie Ecclestone try and bribe Tony Blair over cigarette advertising at Formula One meetings we’ve known that New Labour is corruptible. Cash for Honours confirmed it.

A great semiconductor company has a culture, and that culture usually comes from one person. At Intel it came from co-founder Bob Noyce who, as the son of a non-conformist Minister, respected excellence and loathed hierarchy.

Apple seems to have become paranoid about its foreign iPhone sales. Yesterday, Vodafone announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten countries: Australia, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy and Portugal, Egypt, India, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.

Apple’s coyness in refusing to reveal whether the iPhone it is launching in ten countries shortly is in fact the 3G iPhone has been a waste of time. Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) revealed that it is the 3G version of the iPhone which it is going to launch in Italy next month.

I needn’t have bothered going to the Dubai desert to find out about the 3G iPhone. Popping down my local High Street produced the same result. The 3G version is out next month in Europe and, in the UK, O2 will handle it.

The question reverberating around the chip industry is: Can Intel compete in a market of which it only owns 10 per cent of the customers' customer base?

The smartest thing about being in the wireless business is knowing when to get out of it. Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) must be wondering what it can do next.

 It is absurd to think that any maker of mobile phones would use an Intel processor chip. It might if Intel sold the processor as a core, but any phone manufacturer using discrete Intel processors would be an idiot.

Wolfgang Ziebart's parting gift to Infineon, as he prepares to depart as CEO at the end of the week, appears to be a notable coup in securing Infineon's position as a supplier to Samsung, the world's second largest supplier of mobile phones.

Another attempt to bring transparency and predictable pricing to the vexed issue of the wireless industry's use of IP, has been launched with Cisco, Intel, Samsung , Alcatel-Lucent, Clearwire and Xohm forming the Open Patent Alliance (OPA) to declare their Wimax patents and say how much they'll charge for their licensing.

Nothing could be a more significant pointer to the importance STMicroelectronics puts on its new wireless joint venture with NXP, called ST-NXP Wireless, than the appointment of Alain Dutheil to be CEO of the new company.

The wireless industry is clearly scared stiff of another round of fabulously costly litigation when it moves to LTE and Wimax, with another defensive IP alliance being formed between Verizon,  Google, Cisco, HP called the Allied Security Trust.

There's a curious yarn flying around today to the effect that Apple has designed  Intel's Atom processor into its iPhone.

Why can't Intel do low-power? Simple answer: Intel has always scaled for speed. Does that mean Intel can't or won't scale for low-power when low-power is required? Yes, seems to be the amazing answer.

Peter Bauer, recently promoted from the curious title of 'Spokesman of  The Management Board' to CEO of Infineon, in succession to ex-CEO Dr Wolfgang Ziebart, says that the company is gathering all the internal information needed to present a memorandum to potential buyers.

Open source mobile operating systems will be the way the mobile industry goes with The Symbian Foundation, backed by Nokia, Motorola, Vodafone, DoCoMo and Texas Instruments among others, and with Google's Android supported by Qualcomm.

The Japanese, those dedicated early adopters of new technology and devotees of the 17-syllable Haiku, have apparently become very enthused about reading short stories on their mobile phone handsets.

 Utility > effort + risk, where: utility = willingness to pay; & effort = everyone's effort, is the equation devised by Steve Baker, Director of Software Platform Strategy at Motorola, for deciding whether a mobile phone application is worth doing.

NXP appears to have made an ass of itself in taking to court a group of researchers from the Radboud University at Nijmegen who cracked the security on the company's RFID chips. A Dutch judge has refused NXP's request for an injunction preventing the researchers revealing their findings.

Now that Nokia and Qualcomm have settled their lawsuit, the question arises: Will Nokia buy chip-sets from Qualcomm?

"We've not been a litigious company," Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, said last week after the settlement of the Nokia-Qualcomm dispute. Crikey. What would a litigious company be like?

There've been some odd comments on the settlement of the Nokia-Qualcomm lawsuit along the lines of who won? This is a weird way to look at a deal which has so many upsides. There are four clear winners:

In that ideal world of making-millions-while-sitting-in-the-pub, the new boom for cell-phone applications is the perfect pub-based industry.

 Wow! Sanjay Jha, formerly Qualcomm's best executive, is to get a package worth, potentially, $94 million for jumping ship to go to Motorola.

Well I've always thought that TV-to-the-handset was a no-go, but the wireless industry has persisted with it, and now it seems even the Asians don't want it.

Today's amalgamation between ST-NXP Wireless and Ericsson Mobile Platforms is  aimed at stopping the Americans from taking over the wireless telecoms industry in Europe.

Amazing to think that NXP, the former Philips Semiconductors, is now out of the wireless business. Who would have thought it could ever happen?

After offering up an excellent article about Freescale's options in the wireless arena, the Austin American-Statesman, which sounds a distinguished organ of the US press, asks its readers for comments.

Holy Smoke! Apple is getting sued for over-stating the data rate on its 3G iPhone. This is a bummer for the telecommunications industry which routinely claims data-rates at least double whatever is realistically achievable.

Forbes magazine dismisses Qualcomm's defeat in the US courts by Broadcom as a 'minor bump'. Qualcomm has been ordered to pay Broadcom all the profit it has made from its QChat service whatever that is, and whatever they may be. What's significant is that it is another legal defeat in a long series of defeats.

Phase change memory has to move from a transistor array to a diode array, has to add non-volatility to a diode array, and will have to master multi-bit per cell technology before it can be a commercial product, according to the CEO of Spansion, Bertrand Cambou.

Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for this one, the ten best apps for those who've managed to 'jailbreak', or unlock their their iPods.

Two of the many buzzes in the wireless world are the concept of ad hoc networks and wireless sensory networks.

The first US service for mobile Wimax users has opened for business, putting pressure on the main US LTE guys, AT&T and Verizon, to get their act together.

The intriguing thing about the chip industry is that it appears to be able to hold contrary opinions simultaneously. Almost nothing you say about it is totally true, almost anything you say about it has some element of truth.

There won't be a dominant player in the wireless industry again, reckons Rich Beyer, Chairman and CEO of Freescale Semiconductor.