Qualcomm finally jumps into bed with GSMA

Rating: Maybe the cellular industry is converging after all

It used to be that cellular chip specialist, Qualcomm, was regarded as the architect of CDMA2000. And the GSM Association (GSMA) was seen as the champion of W-CDMA. Now GoMo News learns that Qualcomm will join the GSMA today. Convergence at last!

There’s no suggestion that Qualcomm hasn’t been playing a major part in the GSM world. Its chips are found inside  numerous GSM handsets and its 3G chips are found inside many a 3G dongle.

But when it came down to future directions, Qualcomm and the GSMA were poles apart. So what has changed all that? GoMo News’ guess is that it all has to do with LTE (Long Term Evolution).

Chatting to ZTE’s vp for wireless technology & strategy, Donglin Shen, he pointed out that Qualcomm has promised to provide a single chipset which will support both flavours of LTE – namely TD-LTE and FD-LTE.

In fact, Qualcomm should be able to start commercial shipments of its LTE chips next month (December 2009). Mr Shen estimates that it will only take his company a few months to create its first LTE product using them.

That product will, of course, be an LTE adapter for portable computers which almost certainly will take the form of a USB dongle. Significantly, Chen revealed that he doesn’t expect to have an LTE handset until one year after that.

So LTE is all about high speed data really. The best bit is that LTE has supporters from both 3G camps – Vodafone and Verizon, for example. So with the network operators getting cozy with each other, Qualcomm might as well make friends with the GSMA.

From a software developer’s perspective, all of this high speed wireless data capability being rolled out is good news. Resource hungry apps become viable.

By co-incidence, GoMo News was sitting in a van today that was driving around the streets of Sham Shui Po in Hong Kong – a district full of high rise developments even though it is residential.

In such challenging circumstances, throughput speeds of 10 Mbit/s were achievable via HSPA +. So – forget what figures are quoted for LTE. The reality should be at least 30 Mbit/s.

Talking about Qualcomm, though, GoMo News might have some bad news for that company. Although a big customer of Qualcomm, Shen said ZTE is very definitely working on its own designs for LTE chipsets.

There’s nothing like a healthy bit of competition, is there?

Tony is based in Surrey and is a veteran comms journalist. Tony also writes on the UK market…. contact him here mailto:tony@mobileinsight.co.uk