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Wireless—Qualcomm’s CDMA grows in global popularity



Wireless: Technology Now Leads in

North America

More than 71 million people with cell phones and other wireless communication devices worldwide now use a technology with roots deep in San Diego , Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA.

Pioneered by locally based Qualcomm Inc., which now licenses it, CDMA technology has seen a 73 percent increase in worldwide popularity over the past year.

That is according to third quarter subscriber numbers released last week at the opening of the CDMA Americas Congress. The gathering of telecom industry officials was at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina on Harbor Island.

Such expansion has happened in an environment of competing standards, one that Perry LaForge, executive director of the Costa Mesa-based CDMA Development Group, noted is not just full of technical challenges but geopolitical hurdles.

LaForge said the 71 million worldwide user number is an all-time high, adding that North America’s 27 million users represent a 105 percent increase over the previous year.

CDMA is now the largest digital technology in terms of subscribers in North America, he said, noting it has surpassed Time Division Multiple Access, or TDMA.

“Some people thought that would never happen,” he said.

The announcements come a few weeks after news that a CDMA network capable of serving 10 million customers is due to open in China next year.

“We’re feeling pretty bullish indeed this will happen,” LaForge said when asked about China’s on-and-off attitude toward the technology. There are “a lot of sort of gyrations you go through” when doing business in China, he said.

China Unicom, the nation’s second largest mobile telecommunications company, will provide the service.

Last week also saw Qualcomm introduce chipsets and software capable of sending data at peak rates of 2.4 megabits per second.

Don Schrock, president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, called the product “a significant enabler for the wireless industry to truly place the Internet in the palm of your hand.”

The company was also to demonstrate technology for locating people who place emergency 9-1-1 calls from mobile phones.

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