NextWave restructures

With two new divisions, NextWave hunkers down into the role of a traditional vendor

Would-be wireless carrier-turned-vendor NextWave is reorganizing, taking all of the various acquisitions its made over the last three years and putting them into two business units focused on mobile infrastructure and mobile devices.

NextWave will fold PacketVideo, which develops software used in millions of multimedia phones, with its home-grown semiconductor division, which began producing WiMAX chips last year. The mobile infrastructure division will incorporate time division-CDMA (TD-CDMA) infrastructure vendor IPWireless and Wi-LAN equipment maker Go Networks into a single unit.

The reorganization dispels any notion that NextWave is merely a holding company collecting companies, technology and spectrum, said NextWave executive vice president for marketing Roy Berger. “This realignment is a reflection of the fact that we are a different company than we were three years ago. It certainly puts to rest any notion that we are a holding company. We are a technology company.”

Before its current incarnation as wireless vendor, NextWave had ambitions of becoming a wireless operator, winning PCS licenses in 1998. But NextWave never launched its planned network and instead sat on the valuable spectrum while it went through bankruptcy. NextWave struck a deal with the FCC to return a portion of the spectrum to the FCC and sold the rest to Cingular and Verizon Wireless for a hefty profit.

After emerging from bankruptcy, NextWave seemed poised to follow its original vocation, purchasing spectrum in the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) auction in 2006, but it also used its horde of cash to buy Go, IPWireless and PacketVideo. Instead of becoming a pure operator, NextWave is planning to use its spectrum to seed its technology in the market, much the same way Qualcomm used its 700 MHz spectrum to create a market for its Forward Link Only (FLO) technology.

So far NextWave has pursued several tracks, licensing PacketVideo’s software to vendors around the world but also pursuing two separate 4G technology tracks, WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE). NextWave sells WiMAX chips, but it also is trying to tackle the 4G market with IPWireless unique infrastructure, which uses unpaired spectrum rather than split spectrum wideband CDMA. While almost all operators globally have deployed their 3G networks using separate unlink and downlink channels (frequency division duplexing or FDD), 4G has opened up a market for networks that use a single channel for up and down transmission (time division duplexing or TDD). While many operators such as Verizon Wireless insist they will only use FDD spectrum in their networks, Sprint and Clearwire are both launching WiMAX networks using unpaired channels.

“Both the FDD market and the TDD market—we intend to pursue them with equal vigor,” Berger said. “But we have a unique opportunity to provide operators with TDD spectrum with a way to use their licenses.”