10Meters.com Report
February 1, 2001 – Qualcomm is taking no chances: The CDMA developer and evangelist yesterday announced the availability of BREW, an open standard platform for its proprietary CDMA technology. It's a move the company says will speed the creation of enhanced 3G handset applications – and give Qualcomm a king-size cushion against emerging platform competitors.
Licenses for BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) are being offered free to handset manufacturers and applications developers and come with a Windows-based Software Development Kit featuring, among other tools, a handset emulator.
The kits are scheduled for release in May.
Qualcomm is hoping BREW will do for CDMA what other moves in the open-standards arena have done: solidify wide-spread, uniform adoption of the platform, which is today facing competition from GSM, which powers the vast majority of wireless handhelds in Europe, and TDMA, which is gaining adherents, notably Cingular, the new joint venture of SBC Communications and BellSouth. Research firm Ovum recently projected that TDMA-similar technologies will represent 79 percent of global wireless subscriptions by 2004.
In Qualcomm's court: Japan's NTT DoCoMo, which recently launched W-CDMA for its wildly popular i-mode platform, which today counts 13 million users, up from zero a year ago.
Qualcomm has heavily patented CDMA and, in turn, champions it for 3G communications and convergence. Qualcomm receives royalties based on the price of CDMA-based handsets.
Qualcomm says its solution will save the wireless community from the "fragmentation" that the PC community faced two decades ago. "Device manufacturers are developing applications for their own hardware or must pay a few select developers to work with them on the arduous task of creating and integrating just a few applications on just a few handset models," said Peggy Johnson, Qualcomm senior vice and general manager of its two-month-old Internet Services division. In the PC industry, this led to fragmentation of resources and platform dead-ends."
"The long-term mission of this division is to make Qualcomm the leader in enabling wireles Internet applications and services," Johnson added. The company said that BREW will eventually be available to other platforms.
Qualcomm said it has has signed memoranda of understanding (MOU) with several wireless carriers, manufacturers and developers, including Verizon Wireless and Leap in the United States, Korea Telecom Freetel, Pegaso in Mexico, Samsung, Kyocera Wireless and Japan's KDDI.
Currently, CDMA is the leading communications platform, with more than 71 million users. Qualcomm Chairman and Chief Executive Irwin Jacobs said last week that demand for the technology was strong and still growing, adding "`We anticipate further growth domestically and internationally during fiscal 2001, with increasing focus on third-generation CDMA deployment."
Qualcomm expects 90 million CDMA phones to be sold worldwide in 2001, although the prices – and Qualcomm's royalty cut – will decline by 20 percent, it said.
