Last week, Qualcomm did something unusual for a tech company in these tough times: Excluding investment losses, Qualcomm reported record profits for the recently ended fiscal quarter — $241 million on sales of $1.1 billion, up from a net of $139 million on revenue of $699 million a year earlier.
Tomorrow’s networks are being designed for much faster connections, largely for data traffic that many believe will dominate usage.
Qualcomm has pitched its own vision of the future based on CDMA, and even its chief rival is moving to a standard that uses a form of the technology. Which means, as CEO Irwin Jacobs says, that some form of CDMA could eventually be part of just about every wireless communications device.
And, it is fair to assume, Qualcomm will be there.
In India, Reliance Infocomm will be launching their cellular service nationwide based on cdma1x, offering upto 144 Kbps data. It is a big bet for both Reliance and Qualcomm, which has so far been a GSM country (with 10 million subscribers). These are still early days – India has the potential to reach a few hundred million subs in the next 4-5 years. GSM or CDMA – that is the question.
