IPWIRELESS TO FOCUS ON CHIPS

IPWireless is dumping its infrastructure business in favor of becoming a core technology vendor. Jon Hambidge, vice president of marketing, said in an interview with Telephony that IPWireless will be phasing out its base station and data card lines over the year as it ramps up its OEM deals with vendor partners and refocuses the company's efforts on building the core baseband processors housing its time division CDMA technology.

Last year, IPWireless took in 90% of its revenues from either direct sales to operators or OEM resale, but Hambidge said the vendor expects that percentage to fall to 50% in 2005. The other 50% of its revenues will come from licensing deals with OEM partners. By the end of next year, Hambidge said, IPWireless plans to be almost entirely a core technology company, with 90% of its revenues coming from licensing deals with companies like UTStarcom. Hambidge said the vendor will continue to support its current carrier and resale customers, mainly with data cards and gateways, but otherwise it will focus entirely on its chipsets, much like Qualcomm does today.

“As we move to bigger operator deals, we've found they don't want to buy from a small private company,” Hambidge said. “Not that there's anything wrong with being a private company. They just want to buy from their existing vendors, which is fine. Our core technology is our processor. We can leave the infrastructure to the large vendors.”

The shift is coinciding with IPWireless' growing success in the 3G market. Its technology centers on the TD-CDMA side of the UMTS standard, which for the last several years has been overshadowed by deployments of wideband CDMA. But as W-CDMA becomes more widespread, Hambidge said, carriers have been looking down the UMTS migration path to time division duplexing and even frequency division duplexing paired-spectrum technologies to delve further into high-capacity broadband. Though IPWireless doesn't release any specific data on sales, Hambidge said its technology was in more than 10,000 end-user devices last year, and IPWireless expects it to easily break the 100,000 terminal mark this year.