« Qualcomm Buys Flarion | Main | Clearwire Ramps Up in U.S. »

August 12, 2005

More on Qualcomm and Flarion

By Nancy Gohring

This is big news and lots of people have theories on it: Now that I’ve had a chance to sleep on it, I’m suspicious that Qualcomm knows something about Flarion’s intellectual property that we don’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if Flarion turned out to own some piece of IP crucial to WiMax and now Qualcomm has managed to find a way to profit from the entire future of WiMax.

As I mentioned yesterday, with Qualcomm’s history in the wireless world, more operators are likely to consider Flarion’s technology now. Most notably may be Sprint/Nextel. Nextel already trialed a Flarion network and every report I read of that trial described happy customers. With an owner like Qualcomm, Sprint/Nextel may take a harder look at Flarion, especially because combining a Sprint CDMA network and a 2.5 GHz Flarion network just got that much easier.

As Om mentions, this deal also makes Qualcomm the big winner in the 450 MHz space. In Finland, all of the bidders said they’d either use CDMA or Flarion. IPWireless also offers gear in the 450 MHz band.

Posted by nancyg at August 12, 2005 9:36 AM

Categories:

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://db.isbn.nu/mt3/mt-tb.pl/3340

Comments