@ Global CDMA Forum: Qualcomm explains ongoing investment in CDMA

SHANGHAI, China — The incredible success of Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM) is inextricably linked to the success of CDMA technology.
The company has been pushing the technology ever since it refined it for use on cellular networks and it continues to reap treasure from a series of patents that followed. Now Qualcomm is reinforcing its position in the wireless space with an extended upgrade path for carriers to follow on CDMA and one that makes sense alongside LTE.
“As a technology enabler we continue to invest in CDMA2000,” Xiang Wang, president of Qualcomm Greater China, said at the 5th Global CDMA Operation and Development Forum last week. “The reason is very simple. We want to build a very smart path to the CDMA carrier to the future 4G technology LTE.”
At the current rate of growth, more than half of all CDMA subscribers will be on EV-DO technology by 2013, he said. And Qualcomm continues to upgrade the EV-DO path to increase voice capacity, thereby freeing spectrum for data use, by up to four times eventually.
“We need to use the spectrum very efficiently and CDMA is the technology that can provide that,” Wang said.
While pushing forward on the network technology improvements, Qualcomm is, of course, continuing to push wireless semiconductor technology just as well.
“We are adding multimode feature into one chip and we also can reduce the footprint of your device,” he said, adding that such strides will give manufacturers the “flexibility to design different form factors to fit the users’ need.”
Wang also said there will be a series of new products coming to the market later this year with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor at the core.
“We all have the experience using the PC. We turn on the PC and wait several minutes some times. With Snapdragon you get instant-on, you don’t have to wait,” he said.
Wang concluded his presentation with some projections, particularly as it relates to the greatest source of subscriber growth and an increasing demand for data.
“When 3G was deployed many people were looking for killer applications. The killer application is the mobile Internet,” he said. “3G subscriber growth will continue to be at a very fast pace.”
By 2014, the amount of mobile data traffic consumed on a monthly basis will exceed the total amount consumed in all of 2008, he added.
“Our technology makes it possible,” he said. “The whole cost of a smart phone is getting lower and lower, so we can serve the entire market with very efficient smart phones.”