CTIA: Wireless future road-blocked by backhaul

SAN DIEGO, Calif. – As one of the leaders in pioneering wireless technology, Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) co-founder Dr. Irwin Jacobs has seen the industry change and adapt more than once before. Now as data pushes wireless networks to the limit, the industry is going through another exciting and challenging transformation. Jacobs and his son, Qualcomm CEO and Chairman Paul Jacobs, took the CTIA IT & Entertainment Keynote stage today to reflect on where wireless has been and what it will take to achieve the future of wireless ubiquity that they are imagining.

Dr. Jacobs knew that CDMA would be a good technology – even though it wasn’t easy convincing the rest of the industry that it wasn’t too complex – but he never imagined that nearly every operator would be installing it and making use of the applications it enabled, he said. Qualcomm now employees more than 1,500 globally, up from the 100 maximum that Dr. Jacobs anticipated when he founded the company in 1985. He retired as CEO of the company in 2005, and his son took over as Chairman last year.

Dr. Jacobs said that skeptics also claimed consumers wouldn’t want a range of functions on their mobile phones. They’d want different devices for each. The key to changing their minds, he said, was creating a human interface for phones that makes people comfortable with all the functions they can do. Apple cracked the code on this when it launched the first iPhone, and simple user interfaces – what the younger Jacob said is the true killer application for mobile – are permeating most new devices that come to market.

“We have a competition, collision and convergence going on between the Internet and phone industry,” Jacobs said. “It is creating interesting partnerships and interesting dynamics.” He said that both of these forces are coming together in a greater way than when they stand alone, but they are also often in conflict. An example of this is Skype, a VoIP service that operators initially resisted, but have very recently begun to accept. “You can adapt ideas from one side or the other, bring them to together then create something new,” Jacobs said referencing Hutchinson’s low-cost phone designed around Skype.

In the wireless future that the Jacobses are envisioning, new uses for wireless present the most exciting opportunities. Dr. Jacobs said e-readers and using technology in the classroom, two initiatives Qualcomm is currently working on, are most compelling to him. To his son, wireless power and the ability to charge multiple electronic devices by placing them on a platter will be an important opportunity. Qualcomm is also working on cyber-signs that send deals to the mobile phone when a consumer passes through, essentially turning the phone into a digital sixth sense, he said. The phone will be a remote control for things in the physical world, but also will be the most direct, personal way to access information about consumers.

There will be formidable challenges on the path to achieving this vision, both agreed. Most pressing is wireless operators need for more headroom on backhaul. Dr. Jacobs said that Qualcomm has done all it can do with spectral efficiency and is now exploring other architectures and tricks to further stretch existing spectrum. He noted that the industry has gotten where it is from reusing spectrum and will have to continue to expand available spectrum through backhaul, devices like femtocells that offload services and reusing what spectrum is already available.

“We are getting to the point where in the labs we’ve done what we know how to do to optimize the spectrum,” the younger Jacobs said. “We have to do new tricks now.” He anticipates an eight to 10 times improvement in user experience if operators build their own networks, but this will take backhaul and the move to LTE to make it work.