Qualcomm goes off at a 700MHz tangent

HAS ANYBODY else noticed that Qualcomm is up to its old tricks and doing its own thing with its newly acquired 700 MHz spectrum rather than following the LTE route?

The company just paid $558.1 million for a bunch of licenses that cover the Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and San Francisco regions.

What is Qualcomm doing with it? Building out its Mediaflo mobile TV network which uses proprietary technology – FLO, that's what.

What have the two other big purchasers of the 700 MHz spectrum – AT&T and Verizon - said they are going to do? Answer: build networks based around LTE (Long Term Evolution).

Verizon seems keenest on LTE and is promising to introduce it by around 2010. Shades of the over-optimism which surrounded 3G there.

It's a pity that Sprint has thrown its weight behind Wimax rather than LTE as otherwise the US cellular industry would be united for a change.

Although Sprint has delayed the launch of that Wimax service – Xohm – until later in 2008. Considering it was originally supposed to have launched in 2007 and until this week – in April – perhaps it is getting cold feet?

But it's hardly likely to can the whole thing.

Back to LTE, however, and it could be very good news in plenty of other ways. For example, Vodafone is strongly backing LTE.
That means when LTE handsets finally arrive, Vodafone could offer its customers outside the USA a handset that will actually work inside the USA on its partner, Verizon's, network.

Better still, China Mobile is backing LTE and that means support for the standard iN the world's biggest cellular market.

So it's going to be very hard for Qualcomm to ignore LTE entirely. That might explain an oblique reference in Qualcomm's licencing announcement.

Apparently it purchased licences in the California-Imperial, New Jersey-Hunterdon and Yuba City, California areas.

That's exactly where it has R&D facilities and the company says it has 12 MHz of paired 700 MHz spectrum to look into "innovative mobile broadband technologies."

With any luck that means LTE and not a 4G version of its existing technologies which could be called something like Cdma2010. µ