Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years (2019)
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I'm curious how long ago this was? I can't find any time period where QTL (the licensing division) made more than QCT (the Snapdragon et. al division). Still, I think your statement's sentiment is the consensus-- that overall, Qualcomm is/has been the "Oracle of hardware" that milks the licensing cow.
Let's look at Q2 '22, Q2 '19, Q2 '16, Q2 '13. I choose 3-year gaps for no particular reason, simply how I personally view company timelines and how long it might take to "steer a ship", e.g. if the CEO wants to change its public perception, it might take a few years. I also choose Q2 simply because Q2 was the most recent quarter. Relatively arbitrary, but still sensible data points when talking about Qualcomm's recent history. Noteworthy also, is that Q2 '22 is about the 1 year anniversary of when the new CEO was instantiated.
($mil) | - QCT - | - QTL -- | QTL % of tot rev
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Q2 '13 | $3,916 | $2,057 | 33.6%
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Q2 '16 | $3,337 | $2,135 | 38.5%
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Q2 '19 | $3,722 | $1,122 | 22.9%
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Q2 '22 | $9,548 | $1,580 | 16.5%
Licensing revenue has actually been flat or on the decline recently. Even in business outlooks, Qualcomm usually directly says "our goal is to maintain QTL" while heavily expanding on QCT, somewhat implying an attempt to cast off this "ran by lawyers" reputation.
Time will tell, I suppose.
[1] https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_ef937ef9314613934ed123...
[2] https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_ef937ef9314613934ed123...
[3] https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_ef937ef9314613934ed123...
[4] https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_ef937ef9314613934ed123...
QTL in Q2 '13 had $1800mil EBT with 88% of revenue contributing to earnings. EIGHTY EIGHT PERCENT. Holy cow. QCT in that same year had $600mil EBT with 17%.
For comparison, QTL in Q2 '22 had $1540mil EBT with 74% of revenue contributing to earnings. QCT in that same year had $3340mil EBT with 35%.
I guess really you can only squeeze so much before the market gets annoyed. Given these numbers, I can't see how QCT would be a loss-leader. Why else would the margins on them be increasing, and margins on QTL be decreasing?
My point is, I believe things aren't as lawyer-y as before. The Qualcomm of today focuses a lot more on its QCT division. Licensing is still obviously there, and will always be an incredibly nice moat, but it's not the suffocating "shakedown" it might have been 10 years ago.
I use Q2 '22 specifically because it's a recent quarter that's most likely to reflect the vision of the current CEO. Given that my thesis is "current Qualcomm is different", I think it's apropos to talk about current results. And my yearly sampling is based off of the assumption that the general business cycle is periodic YoY (i.e. Q2 2020 is roughly similar in growth rates to Q2 2019, barring anything massive like a pandemic haha lol haha).
Furthermore, I also think it's important to look at breakdowns of % of revenues by division, to see how much a company relies on any specific source.
---- | QTL Rev | QTL EBT | QTL % as non-GAAP Rev
FY13 | $7,554 | $6,590 | 69%
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FY14 | $7,569 | $6,590 | 65%
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FY15 | $7,947 | $6,882 | 74%
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FY16 | $7,664 | $6,528 | 80%
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FY17 | $6,445 | $5,175 | 69%
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FY18 | $5,163 | $3,525 | 64%
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FY19 | $4,591 | $2,954 | 58%
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FY20 | $5,028 | $3,442 | 50%
-------------------------------
FY21 | $6,320 | $4,627 | 34%
The pie was rather small back then, and the licensing slice was HUGE. Nowadays, the exact quantity of licensing revenue is actually just reverting to the mean, and the slice is actually decreasing. You can't go by the growth rates you're given there.
Links to FY13--FY19 here. BTW you can skip every other year, since FYXX tends to report FY(XX-1) as well.
https://investor.qualcomm.com/financial-information/historic...
I get that there were some aspects of Qualcomm licensing practices weren't quite kosher, but seems there are lot of folks parroting talking points from Apple who orchestrated the original lawsuit along with FTC behind the door. If you want to talk about "political power," we could talk about Apple all day.
"In the Soviet Union (USSR), the first work devoted to this subject was published in 1935 by Dmitry Ageev... The technology of CDMA was used in 1957, when the young military radio engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich in Moscow made an experimental model of a wearable automatic mobile phone, called LK-1 by him, with a base station."
The regulatory mechanism is what and from whom the participants are willing to purchase.
Fully disagree here. I could list a hundred egregious examples where this isn't true for major aspects of life, but it's late and I'm tired of arguing on the internet. Perhaps tomorrow I'll respond with examples.
Just replace democracy with capitalism and government with market.
They optimize for what they want, not what they need, which is a big difference. They would probably align with public good if it was the latter. Also, they optimize for what people who have money want.
Participants want comfort (which we can't blame them for) and are not incentivized to solve poverty.
Not saying that capitalism did not bring good stuff (won't state it neither), but part of the current result is global warming, pollution and the existence of people living in bad conditions.
Global warming is rather mostly a consequence of overpopulation. In the past, people often died of starvation or illnesses. "Unluckily" capitalism managed to reduce these problems by a lot.
> and the existence of people living in bad conditions.
In most communist countries, the living conditions were worse, so this is rather again a success story of capitalism.
Capitalism does not assume the market optimize for the public good. It assumes when each party optimizes for their own self-interest, that optimizes resource use.
And in terms of regulatory capture/corruption, I hope you're not assuming that it's somehow unique to capitalism? In fact, as the Soviet Union and China have shown, corruption is rather greater under those systems.
As we probably know from the history of 19th/20th centuries, taken to their extreme these ideologies can be highly dangerous.
Communism mainly optimises for the good of the high ranking party members and other apparatchiks in charge they might occasionally throw some scraps to ordinary people but I don't see how can it be considered inherently superior to capitalism in this regard based on real world example.
While following 'capitalist policies' have generally resulted in a significant overall increase in the 'common good' it is unquestionably that it has also caused many terrible tragedies. However pretty much the only positive thing about communism that I can think of is that the fear of it spreading encouraged many western governments to enact progressive social, political and economical reforms (it's debatable whether this was actually a significant factor, though).
This happens when ideology meets the reality of dealing with people, who are mostly egoistic. Pure capitalism ideology leads into another trap: the one of oligarchic rule, with smaller groups of egoists winning the game of monopoly.
A less radical version of communism, the one implemented in late USSR, where the state owns and plans everything for everyone, while proving some common good benefits (medicine, education, etc) also has a couple of fundamental problems.
One is the economical problem of having to plan everything for everyone. A book called "Red Plenty" covers this really well, as well as some bits of a math behind it (linear programming, etc). In market-based economies these problems sort of go away. Until one has to deal with monopolies, that is.
I don't know if somebody has an explanation for the other problem, political in nature. Communists and modern "communist-socialist" states seem to always insist on political monopoly, which makes it impossible for people to provide fast feedback to policy-makers.
So it seems that an optimal balance achieved by "enlightened democratic capitalism", where the exploitive (and economically more efficient) nature of capitalism is balanced by democratic feedback.
It seems, though, that capitalism does allow for faster wealth generation. Given proper corrections and balances, of course.
I can name quite a lot of countries that never went the socialism way, but are not rich in any sense of the word.
As long as we create structures that concentrate power in the hands of the few, policies change and resources flow into those circles.
Isn't that the opposite of "concentrated"?
The bad faith is recognized in communism. It is why it is suggested that nations must first move to socialism in order to pave the way to post-scarcity. It was believed that private interests will create artificial scarcity even after we are able to technically achieve post-scarcity if the public doesn't first gain control over the means of production.
He comes from money, and would have had no problem living anywhere he liked.
Just read his wikipedia page:
> In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded web software company Zip2 with funds borrowed from Musk's father.
If the YMCA story is supposed to signify "rags", then it's a carefully constructed image and nothing else.
Again, in theory.
The U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to issue patents "to promote progress in science and the useful arts." It's not supposed to be all about full employment for lawyers. When patents inhibit progress rather than promote it, they need to be cut short. Resolving this through antitrust seems like a patch - fixing a problem caused by bad government policies and too many lawyers by adding more government policies and lawyers.
Making up some faint new claim, that so happens to largely encompasses the existing claim, feels all too regular. There's just so few people fit to judge, to appropriately decide to award or not award another decade or so of monopoly to a patent.
This is just so proper fucked, such a messed up manipulation. And I agree- it does look legal. The law debases itself, delegitimizes itself, brings shame to itself by permitting this unbelievable horseshit. Which, as others elsewhere have pointed out, is what was allowed: this ruling got appealed & overturned. Qualcomm got away with being a tyrant & ruining an industry.
1. 20 years was the headline, but clickbait at best, misinformation at worst.
2. If Qualcomm had total control, Ericsson and Nokia wouldn't exist.
3. This ruling got appealed & overturned, you should read the original ruling in the 233 report. I dont see how ignoring defendants ( Qualcomm ) testimony would help their when you know there will be an appeal.
why? arguing a point you havent bothered to make is stupid. yiu cant just insult an argument & walk away. 20y is how this horseshit goes with all patents, is a vast delegitimization everywhere. what are you trying to disagree with?
> appealed & overturned
repulsive & heartbreaking, complete neglect of civil & fair society; yeah, we know. the system continues to try hard to legitimize the legal robber barrony bullshit fucked up horseshit that regards only the very wealthy: we know. that's the problem. those at the top are against the public.
lmao. Calm down. Who knew you could get so worked up over boring niche elements of antitrust law that you most certainly don't understand.
this post is about 233 words of quite upright & moral certitude, of a very real & serious getting worked up about anti-trust indignity that was foisted upon the world by a low & dirty corporation.
yes, it was overturned. by cowardly pro-corporate assholes.
we should be outraged. your attempt to quell reason, to dismiss indignity deeply scored against humanity: it's vile, and literally baseless: you've made no cause, set no reason, other than mockery & personal insult. get out. if you don't want to participate in discussions of civil society, please kindly find someplace else to go piss on & stop being a degrading insulting & abrasive jerk to me. you've said nothing of value, injected no concerns: just belittled & mocked.
"boring niche... antitrust" is in fact a major oppressor & wounds us all. you don't have to agree, but trying to degrade & mock people for caring is low. anti-caring is not a valid response. and it's deeply unkind. if you want to make claims, try to state why you think my concern are overblown: that's fine, make a stance. but just blanketly insulting & degrading someone, writing me off with cheap ad-hominem attacks: that's malicious, and gross.
And I don't know but to me calling the judges "cowardly assholes" is the pretty cheap ad hominen attack here. Especially since if you have made 0 effort to actually read what they said, or understand their reasoning. I also hope you realize judges don't create the laws, so blaming them for applying legislation they have no control over... makes your comment sound even more pointlessly outraged and adds to the moral crusade self righteousness.
> Especially since if you have made 0 effort to actually read
Been following & reading tbis avidly for a while mate.
Wild wild overturn here, complete disregard. Ninth circuit living in a fantasy world. One that's terrible for humanity & great for the very large.
And it is from a 2007 account.
Mind you, I think similarly for copyrights too. Every time they got extended they should have instead been shortened by 20%.
Like, copyright might last a lifetime if owned by the author, and some arbitrarily short period if transferred to an incorporated entity. Laws should identify carefully publishers to avoid big corp exploiting the systems, but it could be made to work. Maybe make it so that personal copyright royalties starts from 1% gross revenue of publishing and adaptations, or something else big enough to incentivize money transfers out of coprs and toward artists.
It's just unfortunate that more nuance legislation will get us people playing games to define inventions as the most protected thing possible, whether they really deserve it or not.
Why 5? Why not 2 years? Or 8 years? The same argument could be used to support or known down either option.
In general, I think information-theory and software patents are also highly highly highly bullshit & everyone involved with this unethical & immoral practice should probably be shot into the sun.
If it's going to be longer, patents need mandatory needs Fair Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licensing.
20 years is insane, even with FRAND.
do the same for trademarks and copyrights (perhaps with different starting fees and bases).
Then we have questions about juristiction - does one have to pay this patent fee everywhere, or just in the US?
And of course we'll ignore for the moment that this heavily skews the playing field in favour of large corporations with deep pockets and basically makes it impossible for small companies to enter the patent space.
Lastly it removes patent protection from small companies serving very small niche markets well.
Personally I don't like patents at all, but I see the need for them, mostly as protections for small market entrants. But your suggestion does not solve the problem being discussed, and comes with a raft of unwelcome side effects. So on the whole I would say your suggestion makes things worse not better.
the jurisdiction is the US, since this decision was made in a US court.
it actually helps small companies greatly. many frivolous patents by large companies (flanking defense patents, for example) would fall into the public domain within a couple years. companies would maintain patent only on the things that actually matter. small companies would enjoy many more ways to compete and many more unencumbered ideas to serve as jumping off points. what they wouldn't get is a surefire monopoly of their own.
Shortening the monopoly period simply reduces the time small companies are protected. For example, I invent widget x. I sell 100K worth of that a year. I can live on that. Patent expires, big corp copies x. I can't afford to pay for my patent, so they win. I stop inventing and go get a job at big corp to pay my bills. This is a net loss.
Equally this would not stop patent trolls - since in many cases their patent claims are bogus, BUT it would cost me more (and risk more) to fight it than just pay the license. People don't pay the license _because_ the patent has value, they pay because it's the cheapest route out.
Trying to ban "patent trolls" also fails because "troll" is subjective. If I licensed my widget x above to big corp, and I don't manufacture anything myself, am I a troll?
Your suggestion would not stop "defensive" patents either (although it would reduce their number.) But if you can stop competition with 10 patents you don't need 1000. So it'll have no net-effect.
happy to reengage if you can reformulate these thoughts into a rational position.
For a long time, the power amps to make that work had an absolutely abysmal yield and only a single company (Rockwell Defense) could fab them.
The company walked a tightrope and could very well have died. This is the kind of tech advancement that absolutely deserves some level of patent protection.
The fact that the patent system allows this to be parlayed into a multi-decade shakedown is different from whether Qualcomm should have been granted patents initially.
The spirit of the SEP process was supposed to be essentially a quid pro quo: everyone can volunteer to join and then have their IP used in a way that would normally be illegal (all players leveraging various government granted or built monopolies to essentially force the entire world to use and pay for certain IP), and thus get a massively larger market for their products, but in exchange have to give up the normal full levels of control a patent would afford by offering RAND terms to all on the value of those specific contributions. It's a bet that more money can be made from a guaranteed smaller cut on billions of devices vs a large cut on ones own vertical stuff (and possibly being frozen out of usage in certain markets entirely).
Qualcomm though leveraged that to extract a % of everything else in the device too using this multi-level monopoly. That wasn't OK. If from the very beginning they'd wanted to just demand everyone else not use any of their patents except by specific licensing with them, no inclusion in any standards, that'd be honest enough. Or if they'd gone the other way and full RAND that too. But they wanted to have their cake and eat it and that should have been stomped on by regulators right off frankly.
----
0: I don't think software patents should exist at all because the core investment of software is more than adequately protected by copyright.
Except that everybody could have used some other technology in the standards, but they didn't want to make the bet and drive it through because the bet was risky. And, if it failed, somebody in a big semiconductor company in a nice comfortable position making a lot of money was going to get fired.
I can also turn your statement around into "Qualcomm engineered a working system while their competitors all designed bits and pieces and never put the whole thing together"--which is true, by the way. I watched some of these idiotic competitors to Qualcomm build single pieces and then not cooperate with one another because they were afraid the other guy might make a little more money than they did.
Qualcomm was the beneficiary of 1) a too-long patent grant and 2) a bunch of cowardly dipshits running the competing semiconductor companies.
I agree that patent grants are far too long--this is the original sin that continues to haunt us even today. If stuff like software patent grants were only like 3-5 years, there would be far less opposition and there would be far fewer problems.
However, I also have negative levels of sympathy for the "competitors" to Qualcomm who were whining incessantly but didn't have the brass to actually take them on. Qualcomm was very vulnerable for a very long time, but their "competitors" were a bunch of Keystone Kops who couldn't help but shoot themselves in both feet and then the head.
Like Apple allegedly did PR stunts to slander Qualcomm, to make them look bad despite creating incredibly good tech for the baseband, without which you couldn't eg have an app store because the apps wouldn't have the same bandwidth. No iPhone without it. So they pitched the jury emotional appeals, like "does this seem fair to you?" with Qualcomm's demands.
They just couldn't get the tech working, that was the real problem. Qualcomm had a legitimate inventor's monopoly from my perspective. And secondly, in terms of algorithms, Qualcomm actually hires algorithm engineers whereas Apple appears not to as much. Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Intel, Synopsys, AMD, ARM, those guys hire algorithm designers the most. Well I suppose Apple must because they make chips, so Pennsylvania Semiconductor (IIRC). The difference between algorithms is much greater than the difference between eg mechanical engines, the efficiency improvement scales up, so a 10% difference at one scale becomes 40% if you double the scale.
My point is algorithms are highly elitist and there will ordinarily be one design downstream that everyone wants, and it will be highly protected by IP law. The alternative is to come up with a better one independently, nobody's stopping anybody from doing that, but this turns out daunting and expensive.
EDIT: Apparently, Qualcomm won the appeal[1]. I wonder if the situation is still as bad today as it was when this article came out?
https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets...
(Well, not "profit" in the sense of having shareholders and dividends, but definitely in the sense that its budget comes from fees and it gets more fees if it issues more patents.)
Don't get me wrong, the end effect of patents has been nightmarish (I think mainly because the courts are so out of touch with technology). But I don't think the actual intent behind them is necessary evil or anticompetitive.
You wouldn't say copyright gives an artist a monopoly on any particular type of creativity and - if patents worked properly, which they don't - I like to picture a similar outcome.
It's semantics but I think the word monopoly is both sensitive and overloaded. This is actually a discussion we had during my law degree, but obviously different countries have different particulars and the point I'm trying to make here is more philosophical than legal.
From the article:
> When a standards group is developing a new wireless standard, it assembles a list of patents that are essential to implement the standard—these are known as standards essential patents. It then asks patent holders to promise to license those patents on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Patent holders usually agree to these terms because incorporating a patent into a standard enhances its value.
> But Qualcomm doesn't seem to be honoring its FRAND commitments. FRAND patents are supposed to be available on the same terms to anyone who wants to license them—either customers or competitors. But Qualcomm refuses to license its standards-essential patents to other chipmakers.
So Qualcomm has a monopoly on essential technologies to implement standards. If you "come up with your own solution", then you are no longer standards-compliant. That means these patents give them a non-negotiable monopoly on an entire industry.
> You wouldn't say copyright gives an artist a monopoly on any particular type of creativity
You wouldn't say that because that's factually incorrect. Copyright protects specific works, not ideas/concepts/styles/etc.
If patents were only applied to "expensive R&D that leads to a simple implementation", I think there would be much less argument over their benefit to society. But what seems to frequently happen is that patents are issued covering abstract, conceptual ideas which are just rearrangements of existing techniques in a marginally novel way, and which may never have actually been proven by a concrete implementation. That's not really rewarding research effort, it's just rewarding whoever was first to stake their claim and pay an attorney to draft the language convincingly.
And what's particularly galling is when a company obtains large numbers of patents like that, but only has the focus and/or resources to turn a tiny fraction of them into real products. So whatever consumer value might theoretically have been created by the others is squandered until the patent expires.
I think a fair understanding of the history of patent law allows for both. However their increasing use as tools of monopolies is clearly the pattern we've seen over the last 40 or so years.
> The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Which is pretty clear that the end goal is incentivizing R&D that ultimately contributes to the public domain, with the temporary monopolies being merely a legislative tool to achieve that purpose.
They were never intended to reward innovation. They do intentionally grant fixed-duration monopolies.
Patents were intended to encourage companies to disclose trade secrets, forwarding public knowledge. In return, that company is granted continued exclusive use of the idea, as if it had never been revealed. This is also why ALL patent drawing are in the public domain.
How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20055517 - May 2019 (300 comments)
> Qualcomm's patent licensing fees were calculated based on the value of the entire phone, not just the value of chips that embodied Qualcomm's patented technology. This effectively meant that Qualcomm got a cut of every component of a smartphone—most of which had nothing to do with Qualcomm's cellular patents.
This lawsuit by FTC was largely concocted by Apple's multiyear efforts to pay as little as possible for Qualcomm's wireless invention (royalty) and save their bottomline -- with Apple repeatedly on the losing side not only against Qualcomm, but also every other wireless patent holders like Nokia, Ericsson, etc..
The Court orders the following injunctive relief:
(1) Qualcomm must not condition the supply of modem chips on a customer’s patent license status and Qualcomm must negotiate or renegotiate license terms with customers in good faith under conditions free from the threat of lack of access to or discriminatory provision of modem chip supply or associated technical support or access to software.
(2) Qualcomm must make exhaustive SEP licenses available to modem-chip suppliers on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (“FRAND”) terms and to submit, as necessary, to arbitral or judicial dispute resolution to determine such terms.
(3) Qualcomm may not enter express or de facto exclusive dealing agreements for the supply of modem chips.
(4) Qualcomm may not interfere with the ability of any customer to communicate with a government agency about a potential law enforcement or regulatory matter.
(5) In order to ensure Qualcomm’s compliance with the above remedies, the Court orders Qualcomm to submit to compliance and monitoring procedures for a period of seven (7) years. Specifically, Qualcomm shall report to the FTC on an annual basis Qualcomm’s compliance with the above remedies ordered by the Court.
It seems like the lack of penalties for abusing IP you agreed to provide on FRAND terms means that there is no penalties for this kind of behavior - worst case scenario you get pushed back to what you had originally agreed to anyway. Making it so being caught violating your agreement meant that you permanently lose all your future IP revenue as well seems like the only thing that would ever cause any change in behaviour.
The goal of these standards is not to be open and free but to allow for multiple proprietary but compatible implementations to exist. For better or for worse, mobile phones need to be able to talk to each other via standardized infrastructure and you need to agree some technical specifications for that. That's the need these standardization bodies serve. Making it easy for others to enter the market is not a goal and actually explicitly not a goal.
Implementing these specifications requires access to patents from the main specification authors. This ensures these make a nice profit and ensures companies are willing, and even eager, to commit their IP to being part of a standard. It's the key way for them to monetize their R&D.
American CDMA was not competitve with internationally used GSM (well, no competition existed those days so America kept using it.)
3G (WCDMA) was not a great standard. Very energy-inefficient. Operators are happy to shut it down.
In 4G it's no longer used. What about 5G?
So Qualcomm being the Microsoft of radios? Dominating the world with 2nd class technology and first class shady business practices?
That's a curious statement. In the US, CDMA (IS-95), TDMA (IS-54/136), and GSM all competed. It was in Europe that there was no competition.
WCDMA wasn't a great standard. WCDMA basically came from the GSM camp as a competitor to Qualcomm's CDMA2000/1xRTT/1xEV-DO.
Qualcomm's CDMA had more capacity than TDMA and GSM, soft handoffs, and importantly in America the phones would also support AMPS (analog) networks that provided rural coverage while networks were being upgraded (and the 35km coverage limit of GSM may have been impactful in flat, rural areas of the US - it's easy to underestimate how much of the US is rural). Qualcomm's user-equipment was also better and it's still king today.
Qualcomm also often provided a more pragmatic option for carriers. Upgrading a network with 1xEV-DO meant carving out 2.5MHz. Upgrading a network with GSM's 3G standard (WCDMA) meant carving out 10MHz. If you're a carrier that's facing capacity issues and only has 30-40MHz, that means carving out a huge chunk of space to upgrade. You need to start getting new handsets into people's hands fast. Worse, while being able to carry voice and data over the same system is great in theory, it meant that as carriers were upgrading their networks over 5 years, your new 3G phone might be placing a call via a tower that's farther away than a GSM tower or you might be stuck on a marginal 1900MHz 3G connection while an 850MHz GSM connection would be stronger. Qualcomm's data-only approach meant that customers still had the same, reliable voice connection they always loved. Upgrading from GSM to WCDMA meant getting a phone that would be connecting to an under-construction "beta" network that often didn't have the coverage of the older GSM network - but your phone would hold onto a really marginal WCDMA signal and you'd get a bad experience. For a carrier like AT&T to launch low-band WCDMA meant carving out nearly half of its low-band spectrum for WCDMA - and in a suburban/rural country like the US where 1900MHz coverage was pretty sparse at the time, that meant reducing capacity a lot or waiting until most people had WCDMA phones. Verizon, on the other hand, could simply 1xRTT (slower data) areas if they launched 1xEV-DO at 1900MHz while still offering the same solid voice service - or they could carve out 10% of their low-band spectrum for data. Both of those offer a way better path forward for both the carrier and the users.
LTE and 5G NR have moved to OFDMA, but CDMA was better than the TDMA/GSM (and iDEN) networks that were the other choices in many respects. It was more efficient, but I'd say a big part of it was that Qualcomm just nailed the implementation. WCDMA was just ill-fated, but given that so many countries were going to adopt WCDMA regardless, it didn't really matter. It was the successor to GSM and so most of the world would end up using it. Release 99 with its 384kbps data rate felt a bit like a joke compared to 1xEV-DO's 2.45Mbps (while having smaller channel sizes).
I wouldn't say that CDMA wasn't a good technology. It was a better technology than GSM or TDMA. It was more efficient and Qualcomm's CDMA provided a superior experience. WCDMA was a bit garbage at first. HSDPA improved downloads and HSUPA later improved uploads and HSPA+ further improved things and did show that wider channels had some good offerings - but it was a really rough transition. Plus, it was just really inconsistent and usually had higher pings than EV-DO (even if it'd perform better on a speed test). While AT&T and T-Mobile rolled out HSPA+, Verizon rolled out LTE and once again they'd have the benefit of the rock-solid CDMA voice network they'd been building for so long and a far better data option (while AT&T had upgraded from TDMA to GSM and GSM alongside WCDMA and now would need LTE as well).
That's not to say GSM/WCDMA didn't have some advantages. Handsets were cheaper and you weren't beholden to Qualcomm so much. The 5MHz channels would have a bit more longevity, but arguably if Verizon hadn't chosen LTE Qualcomm would have continued evolving their proprietary standard more (and in hindsight I think anyone would say that WCDMA should have supported smaller channel sizes to accommodate an easier launch).
The allegations in the trial were often related to Qualcomm's practice of using patent royalties to bolster its chips division whose sales would then bolster its ability to build-up it's patent portfolio whose royalties then boosted its chips division... Qualcomm wasn't dominating the world with 2nd class technology. They were using their first-class technology to keep reinforcing their dominant position. If you're European and your experience with "CDMA" is "WCDMA", I can see how you might think poorly of it. If you're an American, you could see Qualcomm's CDMA being so much better than GSM and WCDMA. I think it's also likely that a good bit of LTE's success has come because of Qualcomm's work on it. Qualcomm definitely wasn't pushing second-rate stuff. The GSM camp pushed a half-baked WCDMA that used some of Qualcomm's technology, but that Qualcomm wasn't really backing (hoping that people would choose their proprietary CDMA 1xEV-DO system instead). With 3G technologies, everyone adopted CDMA-style systems (whether Qualcomm's or the GSM camp's). With 4G technologies, everyone went with OFDMA. However, implementation matters and along with allegedly anti-competitive business practices, Qualcomm is also pretty great at creating top-tier wireless stuff. They threw their weight behind LTE and have continued to create the best LTE chipsets out there.
> American CDMA was not competitve with internationally used GSM (well, no competition existed those days so America kept using it.)
I worked with Voicestream DCS-1900 in 1996 or so. Yes, it was a GSM network. But on a commercial base I would not call it competition. They were a tiny little niche player. All the big one use "American" standards, and their networks were much less advanced than the nation-wide GSM networks in Europe at the time.
Not being a radio engineer I am not 100% sure whether CDMA is really not such a good choice, but the commercially run networks certainly were significantly worse in my experience.
The idea of standardization is that you have a wide range if interoperable network and terminal implementations. That was not something desired in the US. You could not just buy the best phone and use it in any network. Don't remember how it was on the infra side, but I somewhat doubt that it was easy to mix and match various vendors in the same network.
Situation in the US started to change with T-Mobile and ATT using GSM, but that was many years later.
I remember when going to IT conferences in the US 2002 - 2007 nearly all locals had feature phones. When I used my smartphone (SymbianOS of course at the time) they told me that's a completely useless gadget, all they wanted to do is make voice calls. Of course around 2010 things had changed completely.
Oddly the S22 in UK has a different processor from the S22 in the US.
https://www.tomsguide.com/features/samsung-galaxy-s22-plus-b...
It's good to see competition. Apple may not be as anticompetitive as Qualcomm with hardware patents, but their rule to not allow alternative browser tech on iOS seems pretty bad to me.
[0] https://www.macworld.com/article/554612/iphone-custom-5g-mod...
It took me several months of strictly non-4G-related work to recognize vanity license plates again.
Qualcomm did nothing wrong and this was all part of Apple's massive campaign against Qualcomm to force a positive settlement for themselves.
Is this a joke? Have you read the article?
In my opinion Qualcomm is at the top of evil corporations. As the original ruling said.