OFDM--The new CDMA?

Qualcomm has come a long way from being a one-technology horse. The king of CDMA just added Flarion's significant portfolio of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) intellectual property to its growing list of technologies. Couple that with its efforts in wideband CDMA and multicast multimedia, and Qualcomm is much more than just a champion of its original CDMA patents.

Most of the industry, however, has approached the Flarion acquisition as a separate but parallel technology to its CDMA development tracks. There's a bigger picture that they might be missing, though. There's a good chance that Qualcomm will pursue OFDM as the eventual successor of its current CDMA technologies, not as an alternate or complementary technology. In fact, it's already indicated it's planning just that. OFDM is the modulation scheme behind its MediaFlo broadcast video technology, and while that's a proprietary technology, Qualcomm has also shown its willingness to pursue OFDM in the standards bodies. In its last submission to the 3GPP2 for the next revisions of EV-DO, Qualcomm proposed OFDM to power the technology's downlink.

Qualcomm isn't the only vendor looking at OFDM. Most of the major wireless infrastructure makers have been running OFDM trials of their own, and almost all of them concede that the modulation scheme coupled with next-generation wireless technologies is currently the fastest thing they have as a candidate for future 4G networks. Qualcomm isn't acquiring a new product line. It's acquiring a technology that will likely be the basis of all its future product lines.

Contact me at kfitchard@primediabusiness.com.