Report says UMB could lose out in 4G race
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Dec 29th 2007 4:08PM
posted Dec 29th 2007 4:08PM
At first glance, you might think things aren't looking too rosy for Qualcomm, the chipset maker / patent holder extraordinaire that has a penchant for suing, getting sued, and developing "standards" that run counter to popular support. After all, the Broadcom patent infringement suit is dragging on with no end in sight -- and now this, a report from ABI Research analysts suggesting that its answer to LTE and WiMax in the 4G race, Ultra Mobile Broadband, could come up short. The problem isn't that UMB's performance sucks -- quite the contrary actually, with speeds allegedly topping out at 288Mbps downstream -- but rather that no major carrier has signed up to implement it. Indeed, CDMA stalwarts like Sprint and Verizon have both turned to alternatives for their next-gen networks, and it certainly doesn't help that LTE has the GSM Association's full blessing and support. Then again, Qualcomm claims that it'll be doing plenty of royalty collectin' regardless of what 4G tech wins out, so we're not ready to prep the obit just yet.
VZW going with LTE pretty much killed UMB right then and there.
i'd just go with, whatever 4g tech that has less patents owned by Qualcomm, thats the real win
Qualcomm is going down, it's all going as planned, muahahaha
Isn't 4G supposed to be 1 Gb/sec down when still, and 100 Mb/sec when moving?
What I'd like for someone to explain to me is... what do I want with more than 1 or 2 meg down on phones which have screen resolutions that average 320x240 and storage capacities less than a gig on average with only up to around 8gb on the max. The only thing I could think of is for something like the iPhone where you might want iTunes on demand. Even so that wouldn't require that much more bandwidth then what's currently available now. Where I really want 4G is in my house but that seems like it'd be way too expensive. What the hell is taking ATT/Verizon so long to get fiber my way...JEEZ
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981
I think what consumers want is a standard for all cell phones. If Qualcomm creates yet another splintered data standard, consumers will get an even worse deal than they already have today with two data 3G standards: UMTS and EVDO.
Brian www.outdoorrugged.com