Qualcomm Inc. and Ford Motor Co. perpetuated the marriage between wireless communication and mobility last week, creating a new company called Wingcast, which will develop and deliver wireless mobility and information services to cars and trucks, and give Qualcomm a means to main-line new services to a mass audience of new wireless users.
“With Wingcast, the car becomes another way to get on the network,” said Paul Jacobs, executive vice president of Qualcomm. “We will tap into the loyalty people have for their cars.”
Ford cars and trucks will be the initial recipients of Wingcast’s services, expected to deliver data at speeds up to 144 kilobits per second. Nissan also is working with Ford and Qualcomm to bring Wingcast services to some of its luxury vehicles. Ford said it expects about 1 million of its vehicles to be equipped with the telematics services by the end of 2002.
Harel Kodesh, former vice president of consumer appliances at Microsoft Corp., was appointed Wingcast’s president and chief executive officer. The San Diego-based Wingcast will offer consumers access to communications, navigation, entertainment, safety and security services from their vehicles, as well as from any compatible mobile device or computer, Qualcomm said. It primarily will be a client/server-based architecture, meaning less equipment will be in the vehicle and more will be embedded in the wireless device, such as a phone, personal digital assistant or laptop.
Wingcast services will be rolled out initially in North America over cdmaOne digital wireless networks, and eventually extend to Europe and Asia. Qualcomm also said it plans to develop advanced offerings using cdma2000 and wideband-CDMA networks.
Under terms of a deal between Ford and Sprint PCS, Sprint will be the carrier for Wingcast through 2001. Brian Kelley, vice president of Ford and president of ConsumerConnect, said beyond that however, Ford is unsure of which carrier will provide its wireless service.
“We will be reselling wireless minutes, but we haven’t announced who it will be with,” Kelley said.
Throughout the industry, a somewhat surprising outpouring of support greeted the Ford/Qualcomm announcement.
ATX Technologies Inc., also a telematics service provider for Ford, Nissan and several other car manufacturers, said it was excited by the prospects that Ford is refocusing on telematics. Gary Wallace, spokesman for ATX, said the details as to how Wingcast will affect its relationship with Ford still are being worked out, but ATX will be ready to assist the company if necessary.
“As telematics delivers more functionality to mobile people, it will begin competing with services that are provided by carriers just to a wireless handheld device,” Wallace said. “Telematics is not car-centric. The vehicle just happens to be one node on a wireless network, and the people at Wingcast understand that.”
Motorola Inc., long a supplier of equipment to General Motors Corp.’s OnStar system, as well as to Ford, also expressed its enthusiasm over the deal. Joe Gugliemi, Motorola’s Integrated Electronics Systems Sector president, said during the company’s financial analysts’ meeting last week in Chicago, it will continue to serve Ford, and that Wingcast “puts another service entity into the marketplace.”
Qualcomm’s Jacobs emphasized the reach Wingcast gives new wireless technologies of various kinds, given that not all people foresee a need for a wireless device, but most everyone will buy a new car at some point in their lives.
“We’re going to be able to build critical mass to drive innovation. We see that as a very critical differentiator,” Jacobs said. “You have this very large community to build what we call `network effect.’ “
Qualcomm also can build off its experience in fleet management and tracking with its OmniTracs service. Today more than 350,000 OmniTracs units are on the roads, according to Jacobs.
In the next several years, Wingcast, already at a disadvantage to OnStar because of its late start, will have to work intensely to compete with the GM division. Last week Toyota Motor Corp. announced it will use the OnStar system in its vehicles sold in North America. GM said it is signing up approximately 1,500 customers a day.
Nortel Networks, Telus Mobility and Redknee.com also announced it demonstrated an in-vehicle mobile solution called “AIME,” or Advanced Intelligent Mobile Entertainment, that delivers wireless Internet, personalized information and streaming multimedia content to automobiles.
AIME operates on the Telus Mobility network using Nortel’s cdma2000 1XRTT wireless Internet technology, which also can support data rates up to 144 kbps. The demonstration was part of a cdma2000 network trial conducted by Nortel and Telus Mobility.
