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March 28, 2007

Qualcomm Demos Its WiMax Alternative

By Glenn Fleishman

Qualcomm is calling it Ultra Mobile Broadband, but it smells like a WiMax competitor: Qualcomm has no interest in mobile WiMax, and lost out in the supplier deal to several WiMax-backing firms when Sprint picked its fourth-generation network architecture. But they’re out there plugging UMB, an evolution for its CDMA2000 standards that are currently deployed as EVDO. UMB can handle larger swaths of spectrum—up to 20 MHz channels, Qualcomm says—and speeds of up to 40 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up. They’re demonstrating a complete solution from modem to base station for carriers at the cell industry trade show this week.

(I believe UMB has previously also been known as EVDO Rev. C, just for some clarity, and the technology approach is what was once called 802.20 and was brought into the company through its acquisition of Flarion.)

One reason Sprint chose mobile WiMax over Qualcomm and other options was that they wanted many suppliers an a rich ecosystems. Mobile WiMax, even though it’s still an infant technology in many ways, has a lot of people pouring a lot of money in who will all be competing against one another. In the Qualcomm world, there’s Qualcomm and a few partners, but nothing like the robust multi-vendor jungle that WiMax appears to be growing.

Posted by Glennf at March 28, 2007 11:51 AM

Categories: 802.20, future technologies

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