Vendors accuse Qualcomm of squeezing UMTS market

A consortium of GSM technology vendors have lodged a complaint against Qualcomm with the European Commission, accusing the San Diego chipset vendor and CDMA patent holder of using its monopoly on essential Wideband CDMA patents to squeeze competitors in the 3G market.

The six companies, Broadcom, Ericsson, NEC, Nokia, Panasonic and Texas Instruments all have a significant stake in the UMTS market, and they all claim that Qualcomm is reneging on the promises it made to European and global standards bodies when key elements of Qualcomm's WCDMA technology were included in the UMTS standard and is additionally in violation of EU law for a number of anti-competitive practices. In a joint statement, the vendors said when Qualcomm pushed for WCDMA as a 3G standard it promised regulators that it would license its technology on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. If Qualcomm had not made those commitments the technology would not have been adopted, the statement said.

"We believe Qualcomm has abused its licensing position in certain standards and has inhibited legitimate competition," TI General Counsel Joe Hubach said in the statement. "If this conduct goes unchecked, the risk is that consumers in Europe and around the world will pay higher prices for mobile phones and services and have less access to innovative products."

Specifically, the vendors accused Qualcomm of offering lower royalty rates to handset vendors that buy chipsets exclusively with Qualcomm and refusal to license key technology patents to other chipset vendors on fair terms. They accused Qualcomm of charging excessive royalty rates for WCDMA patents and said that Qualcomm charges the same royalty rates for WCDMA handsets that it does for CDMA2000 handsets, even though Qualcomm's intellectual property is used much more in the latter technology than in the WCDMA standard.