FAST FORWARD

Quick talk about what's next

On the wings of growing support for CDMA wireless technology in Asia and India, Qualcomm CEO Irwin Jacobs is seeking new growth opportunities in CDMA 1X EV-DO (the new data-only CDMA broadband technology) on a global scale. He spoke to Ed Gubbins recently about Asian markets and the future of the technology.

On carrier adoption of EV-DO: The only question is timing — when carriers feel their 1X offerings have been in the market long enough and they're ready to introduce the next technology. In South Korea, the time period between the introduction of 1X and EV-DO was shorter than we expected because Korean carriers found that data was contributing to their ARPU. EV-DO really is going to be the future of the wireless industry.

On South Korea's high broadband saturation: It's the same issue people kept raising about the cellular market — that it was saturated, so CDMA 1X would have a slow take-up. In fact, it's had a very rapid take-up. If you provide high data rates at low cost with mobile as well as fixed broadband, people find uses for it.

On South Korean carriers losing government subsidies: There have been some indirect subsidies even beyond the government's time limit. As a result, carriers will not be allowed to bring in new subscribers for different periods of time. But they'll time it such that there are always two operators able to offer new phones. New subscribers are a small part of the Korean market right now. Existing subscribers can still upgrade their phones.

On China's interest in TDS-CDMA: We support it. It's aimed at a more limited market than the wide-area coverage of CDMA2000 and WCDMA. Also, it will be considerably later to market than even WCDMA. Near term, I don't see any immediate impact.

On what's next: We're putting the GPS-1 capability on all the chips that will be sold here in the U.S. — global positioning at little additional cost and no increase in size. That's a safety factor, but it's also going to be useful for navigational and mobile commerce. Public safety agencies have to set up all their communications equipment to make use of this, and that's going more slowly than many of us hoped. But U.S. CDMA carriers are pretty much shipping only phones with this capability next year.