WASHINGTON-While lawmakers and industry executives toiled last week through the minutia of competing third-generation wireless technologies, Qualcomm Inc. was laying the foundation to parlay an esoteric standards dispute into a major trade debate that would pit the United States against Europe in the not-too-distant future.
In addition to public pronouncements on 3G, Qualcomm is practicing quiet diplomacy to build support here by framing a highly technical issue in a way official Washington is sure to understand and that will have broad bipartisan appeal to those who support the policy of exploiting America’s technological edge in the global market.
For Qualcomm, the innovator of Code Division Multiple Access technology deployed by top mobile phone carriers here and overseas, the critical issue isn’t so much which 3G proposal(s) the United States submits to the International Telecommunications Union by June 30 or even which standard(s) eventually emerge from Geneva.
When the dust settles, cdmaOne will be there, the San Diego firm believes. For two reasons: One is that Qualcomm insists cdmaOne is a superior technology. The second is Qualcomm patents, the company says.
Today’s 3G technology forerunner is a European version of digital technology based on a Global System for Mobile communications platform-called W-CDMA-which Qualcomm believes has been made intentionally incompatible with cdmaOne, and which Qualcomm believes uses its patents.
As such, Qualcomm says Europe cannot go forward with W-CDMA without dealing with the sticky little issue of intellectual property rights. Qualcomm holds 130 CDMA patents and has 400 patent applications pending in the United States and around the world.
Qualcomm supports converging cdmaOne and W-CDMA, but those aligned with GSM technology oppose doing so because they say it will dumb down 3G technology. Qualcomm disagrees.
Qualcomm said it is what happens after the ITU standard-setting process is completed-when 3G licensing begins in the Western European market of 15 countries-that counts.
The European Commission and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, Qualcomm suspects, will mandate the Eurocentric wireless technology that accommodates Sweden-based L.M. Ericsson and Finland-based Nokia Corp. and locks out Qualcomm’s made-in-America technology.
If that happens, Qualcomm says the issue will become a standards-based trade dispute that perhaps could go to the World Trade Organization. That is precisely how Qualcomm is framing the issue as it meets with lawmakers and Clinton administration officials.
“The ETSI system is politicized,” John Major, Qualcomm executive vice president, told Chairman Connie Morella (R-Md.) and other members of the House Science subcommittee on technology last Thursday.
Major has experience in high-profile trade disputes. As a former executive of Motorola Inc., the top U.S. mobile communications supplier, Major and his colleagues several years ago convinced the U.S. government to pressure Japan to open its cellular market to Motorola products.
So high a priority was the issue that the United States and Japan were on the verge of a trade war over cellular phones before Japan acquiesced.
Qualcomm is hoping that history will repeat itself, this time across the Atlantic.
But it’s not at all clear that will happen.
For one thing, Qualcomm may not get as much public support as it would like from top U.S. wireless equipment manufacturers-Motorola and Lucent Technologies Inc.-even though they’ve expended significant resources on CDMA development. Same goes for Northern Telecom Ltd. of Canada.
All three firms are tooled to build to any 3G standard and do not want to take a strong public position that could jeopardize existing and future business in Europe and emerging markets around the world where GSM systems operate. GSM is the dominant digital telephony standard today.
For Ericsson and others, there are issues of protecting investments in existing infrastructure, ensuring global roaming and designing a 3G platform that supports sophisticated data and multimedia applications.
“We are working closely with the entire U.S. operator community to support the most beneficial solutions for the majority of operators and customers in the United States and the world,” said Bo Piekarski, vice president of wireless marketing for Ericsson.
Oliver Smoot, executive vice president of the Information Technology Industry Council, told Morella the U.S. government should back American companies if what’s best for them means supporting an overseas technology.
Lawmakers were strongly urged by all industry representatives not to mandate a particular 3G technology.
“I am convinced that as long as the international standard-setting process is driven by the merits of individual technologies, and not protectionist policies, U.S. manufacturers and service providers will fare extremely well,” said Morella.
Morella said there is not a consensus within government on how to promote U.S. interests regarding 3G wireless telephony.
