Qualcomm has perhaps in the past been hissed at in the corridors of 3GSM the major European cellular technology show, characterized by some as an unwelcome presence, offering alien, proprietary technologies, with huge royalty schemes, which leave handset makers and network builders held to ransom by the US intellectual property driven upstart.
Of late doomsayers have been keen to write off Qualcomm, citing weakness in CDMA demand, and momentum gaining in W-CDMA, also called UMTS, the primarily European driven wireless standard that was long delayed in seeing the light of day.
Some would say it is obvious that CDMA’s days are numbered, or at least its rampant days of growth are numbered, so Qualcomm must look elsewhere for growth. So Qualcomm’s invasion of the W-CDMA camp seems its obvious next step.
So the Qualcomm that arrived at this year’s 3GSM came with multiple firsts in technology, effectively a full scale attack on the W-CDMA suppliers of Europe, offering new user interface technology, a global lead in HSDPA bandwidth delivery at 28 Mbps, a mobile TV deal with the strongest US W-CDMA carrier, yet another snipe at European derived DVB-H technology with a second MediaFLO trial in the UK and news that Abertis, previously central in Spanish DVB-H trials was partnering a demonstration for the 3GSM show of MediaFLO and Qualcomm announced early delivery of mobile TV chips that threaten to conquer world markets.
There was also a rousing cry from Qualcomm senior management that although it might prefer to keep its Intellectual Property business as part and parcel of the chipmaker, it was prepared, perhaps even this year, to split off the IPR side of the business, and concentrate on becoming the biggest chip maker in the cellular world, as a separated business.
The new HSDPA product on the roadmap for Qualcomm will be called HSPA+ and this is simply the 3GPP defined next generation of WCDMA. Qualcomm says it is on schedule to have sample chips for it by the end of 2007 in the form Mobile Data Modem MDM8200. which it says will support deployments in existing frequency bands, as well as in the 2.5 GHz IMT-2000 Extension band.
Dr Sanjay Jha, chief operating officer of Qualcomm said, ‘HSPA+ will enable UMTS operators to seamlessly evolve their networks, utilizing their existing investments to deliver next-generation services starting in 2008.’
HSPA+ is based on the 3GPP Release 7 standard which is supposed to provide data rates of up to 28 Mbps on the downlink and 11 Mbps on the uplink. Right now second generation HSDPA is delivering more like 3.5 Mbps and the early dreams of offering 14 Mbps by now have evaporated as equipment makers have found it harder to do than originally thought.
Qualcomm says that its performance comes from using Multiple Input Multiple Output antennas, what it calls TrueMIMO technology and the technology drew glowing endorsements from Cingular, Telecom Italia Mobile, Telstra and 3 Group, all hungry for broadband wireless class power on their W-CDMA networks.
3 Group in particular in Europe has thrown down the gauntlet to other European operators, by offering an aggressive suite of IP based broadband services including Skype and TV Placeshifting, which it calls its X-series offerings. To do X-series really well it needs improved data bandwidth such as these new Qualcomm chips may bring.
Qualcomm in particular drew attention to the Continuous Packet Connectivity feature set in HSPA+ Release 7 which it says will double voice capacity for VoIP over wireless and it says that trials of the technology will commence in early 2008, with the first commercial deployments expected in late 2008.
Qualcomm has already made some headway with its uiOne interface building technology for handsets, already in use by LG Electronics to produce Apple iPhone class interfaces, with a rapid time to market. At 3GSM it added a new version of its handset development kit (HDK), supporting integration with third-party application engines, and says that many software developers are already developing browser, messaging, device management and other applications for the uiOne platform.
‘The latest version of the uiOne HDK offers the ability to easily port third-party applications to handsets based on Qualcomm chipsets and develop customized user interfaces for those applications. We are pleased by the very strong support it is already receiving from application developers,’ said Mark Frankel, vice president of product management, Qualcomm CDMA and said that developers supporting the uiOne HDK include Opera, Teleca, TechSoft and OpenWave.
The Cingular deal we have analyzed in depth elsewhere in the issue, but it continued to have all traditional W-CDMA suppliers on edge throughout the show. And this wasn’t helped by the fact that Abertis Telecom was partnering on a MediaFLO live demonstration with Qualcomm. Abertis has over the past two years worked on DVB-H trials in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia partnering with such notables as Nokia, Telef’nica M’viles and Vodafone.
3GSM attendees were able to view 20 streaming TV channels on a variety of MediaFLO enabled OEM handsets at the Qualcomm booth.
In truth Europe has pretty much universally pledged itself to DVB-H with implementations in Italy and Finland with plans for networks in Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark and Spain, but the desertion of Cingular in the US, from a technology that is aligned with its core W-CDMA cellular technology, has unsettled the DVB-H complacency in Europe.
DVB-H was offering these kinds of demonstrations at shows two years ago, and Nokia said last month that the time for trials was long past and that it was now the time for network build out, but Qualcomm isn’t resting on its laurels. In the UK it has just completed a second MediaFLO trial in Manchester with DTH TV supplier BSkyB.
Once again Qualcomm at 3GSM repeated all of its claims of superiority over DVB-H, most of which have been line by line refuted by the DVB-H community, and which are not believed by transmitter vendors, but Qualcomm ignores any evidence to the contrary and keeps hitting home the ‘superiority’ message, whenever it can.
But if anything was as much a problem for the DVB-H community as the desertion of Cingular, it was the ease with which Qualcomm has launched its own DVB-H chip.
The chip in question was supposed to be out at the end of the first quarter, and handle both MediaFLO and DVB-H so that Qualcomm had a chip with which to go after all the mobile TV networks around the world, some 40 plus of which either have already adopted or plan to adopt DVB-H.
Instead the Universal Broadcast Modem (UBM) has come out additionally offering support for ISDB-T and it will go to sampling ahead of schedule. For over a year DibCom has been the only DVB-H chip that anyone could buy, joined only recently by chips from Israeli fabless supplier Siano Silicon and DAB specialist Frontier. Texas Instruments and Philips each said almost a year ago that they would have volume DVB-H parts on the market by now, but are still in early sampling mode.
By contrast Qualcomm has beaten its own schedule to market only having mentioned that fact that it was building a multi-standard chip 8 months ago, adding a few standards ‘en route.’
The UBM can work with either CDMA or W-CDMA handsets and includes
support for the entire UHF bandwidth ‘ from 470 MHz to 862 MHz, in spectrum slices of 5, 6, 7 and 8 MHz channel bandwidths.
It can now be used in both single and multi-frequency networks, whereas before Qualcomm said the chips would be made only for single frequency networks, and the company says it will add support for Europe’s L-band, in the future.
The UK is licensing 40 MHz of L-Band spectrum in the 1.452 GHz to 1.492 GHz range at the end of 2007 and there is a distinct prospect of BSkyB winning that auction and implementing a MediaFLO network. At present none of the UK cellular operators are planning to bid for that spectrum for mobile TV, as it would make building a network extremely expensive. However they may bid for it for other uses and just to stop Sky getting it.