According to Jeff Belk, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of marketing, the San Diego-based vendor gains a broad OFDMA portfolio which it can marry up to the work that it is already doing in this area as well as a 110 strong team of engineers. “It also allows us both to continue to develop OFDMA to see how the technology matures and to offer operators another potential avenue for differentiated services”.

In the minds of the mobile industry Qualcomm means CDMA2000 but Belk claims that over the last five years the company has broaden its activities, most notably in its growing role in WCDMA and HSDPA. It also acquired location technology vendor Snaptrack to gain expertise in GPS, and is looking to incorporate Bluetooth and the variants of 802.11 in its chipsets. “We view the world as being one of increasingly heterogeneous radios and we want to provide as broad an offering as possible for operators so they can differentiate and offer as many services as possible”, claims Belk.

Over the last two years Qualcomm has been actively promoting CDMA 450 technology, particularly to former analogue operators in Central and Eastern Europe . This is an area which has also been targeted by Flarion, which has won contracts for the deployment of its FLASH OFDM technology in Croatia and Finland . According to Belk, this apparent clash is not a problem, it simply means that operators will have more choice and will be able to deploy solutions that are a good fit to their particular requirements. “This is something that allows us to accelerate both tracks and operators will either pick them on their merits or pick them in terms of which one is better for their specific applications. So this broadens your portfolio, so it’s a complementary offer depending on what resources the operator, what he wants to do and what suits his requirements”.

On the issue of Flarion’s current commitments, in particular its agreement with Siemens for joint promotion of FLASH OFDM in the 450MHz market, Belk is reassuring. “We will support all of the existing agreements, so none of the agreements are impacted, we will support all contractual arrangements”.

Given that Flarion is unlikely to make any significant contribution to Qualcomm’s bottom line in the near future it could be argued that US$600mn plus is a lot of money to pay out. Belk points to the company’s recent activities in the acquisition area, particularly the purchase of Snaptrack for US$1bn and of MediaFlo for US$800mn. Essentially the argument is that in pursuit of its vision of an heterogeneous RF world, Qualcomm needs to acquire the broadest possible expertise, and given that it can certainly afford to make these purchases, who can gainsay them? “As the company scales up, we don’t do too many of these moves but we are in a position to make these kinds of moves and hopefully capitalise on them”.

Time will tell.
Ian Channing