CTIA: Qualcomm lays out UMB roadmap

ORLANDO--Qualcomm committed to developing an Ultra Mobile Broadband product line today at CTIA Wireless 2007, naming product numbers for what will be its future line of UMB handset and base station chips. Qualcomm also unveiled its first EV-DO Revision B chipset today, a next-generation data-only handset modem that combines Revision A channels into one high-capacity broadband pipe.

UMB is part of the 4G evolution path laid out by the 3^rd Generation Partnership Project, which Qualcomm is largely responsible for founding, but until now it hasn’t been clear whether Qualcomm would fully back the new standard. UMB eschews Qualcomm’s core technology competency, CDMA, for a radio interface-based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. While Qualcomm does have products and intellectual property in OFDM, it has traditionally been CDMA’s champion, backing CDMA’s inclusion into all global 3G standards.

By naming a future UMB handset chipset, the Mobile Data Modem 8900, and a cell site silicon, the Cell Site Modem 8900, Qualcomm is committing to develop the technology, but it doesn’t necessarily mean Qualcomm will evangelize for the technology as it does for its CDMA product lines. Qualcomm Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Jha said that carriers that deploy UMB won’t deploy the new networks wholesale throughout their spectral footprints as they did with CDMA 1X and EV-DO technologies. He said that carriers will likely deploy it where they have new wide swathes of spectrum, using the new capacity to complement their existing EV-DO infrastructure.

“My sense is that one of the great benefits of UMB is that it is a multi-modal technology,” Jha said.

Furthermore, Qualcomm also hinted that a Long Term Evolution chip--the 4G equivalent for GSM vendors--and a WiMAX chip may also be in the offing, though Qualcomm’s support of WiMAX is less than lackluster.

“Even though there has been a lot of hype around WiMAX, it’s just another cellular technology,” Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said at a press and analyst briefing at CTIA. “If it has a large commercial market for a radio technology, Qualcomm will support it.”

Rev. B is not so much a new technology as an added feature to existing Rev. A platforms. It takes multiple 1.25 MHz channels into one super channel, allowing users to share the compounded capacity of the combined spectrum. Qualcomm projects that a 5 MHz Rev. B channel will support average downstream rates of 9.3 MB/s. The new chipset, the MSM 7850, is backwards compatible with all of CDMA 1X technologies and is scheduled to begin sampling this year, though Qualcomm gave no more timing specifics. On the base station side, Qualcomm is offering a software upgrade path, allowing base stations with Cell Site Modem 6800 chips to support multi-carrier EV-DO.

Revision B hasn’t received quite the welcome reception that other EV-DO technologies received when first announced. CDMA carriers like Sprint and Verizon Wireless have questioned whether there are wireless applications that would demand the extremely high data rates of Rev. B beyond those in niche markets.