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I used to work for DSP/C -- one of the first companies Intel had bought in order to enter the Cellular market (later sold to Marvell Semiconductors which, after

I used to work for DSP/C -- one of the first companies Intel had bought in order to enter the Cellular market (later sold to Marvell Semiconductors which, after a few years, exited the cellular market and closed the division) There are a few objective reasons making it difficult to compete in the cellular business and a few Intel specific reasons: - Intel's process and FABs are designed for high performance x86 chips. Not low power cellular chips. Given that the margins on x86 chips are also way higher, there was no incentive to change anything. So the cellular modems were produced using a power hungry process and were less competitive. - At the time, Qualcomm was holding most essential patents required for implementing 3G (and probably now 4G). Licensing fees are enormous burden on anyone entering the market. - Cellular technology undergoes tons of tests by operators, handset manufacturers, base station equipment manufacturers. It takes a lot of effort (and manpower) to execute all these tests and make the required modifications. It doesn't help that the reference platform is Qualcommm. So if you had made different a different tradeoff than Qualcomm, you may do better in some tests but will have to make fixes for other tests. - Some problems are only seen in the field and only in certain places (due to quirky base station equipment, non standard deployment, etc.) Again, it takes a lot of effort to detect and fix those issues. - Qualcomm (The big incumbent in this business) is huge: over 30,000 employees. No way you can compete if all you have is about a 1000-engineers in your cellular division. By the way, the only successful cellular maker I'm aware of besides Qualcomm is MediaTek (Taiwan) which: - Concentrates on the low end market. - Ships complete solutions. You can find lots of different phones which are essentially a single MTK design with very few modifications.

ksec 7y ago
>- At the time, Qualcomm was holding most essential patents required for implementing 3G (and probably now 4G). Licensing fees are enormous burden on anyone entering the market. From what I know, you don't need any licensing to design and implement a 3G/4G/ or even 5G Modem. ( Unless you want CDMA Support ) It is the ODM or Phone Manufactures that has to take care of it. Much like you don't need a license to include H.264 decoder, not even to ship it. But you will need to pay if you decide to enable it. >only successful cellular maker I'm aware of besides Qualcomm is MediaTek Mediatek is awesome. By concentrating on low end, something Qualcomm doesn't want to do, they have an economy of scale for both Fabs Capacity, Design and Modem testing. And just a note, Huawei, assuming they will Settle with Qualcomm, and Samsung both have their own Modem Implementation. These two represent close to 40% of market. And if you include Apple down the line, that is roughly 55%. Adding Mediatek, that is close to 70%. And that is excluding BBK and Xiamoi plans to make their own modem, together they represent 15% to 20%. Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly as media likes to paint it.
- nimrody 7y ago
  Not sure about Huawei, but Samsung is not using their own modem in all of the phones they make. I'm not sure what % but they do use Qualcomm's modem in at least some of the models. 3G is based on CDMA technology (wideband CDMA) and does require licensing fees. It doesn't really matter whether the chip manufacturer or the phone maker pays the fees. The end result is that non-Qualcomm chips make the product more expensive (and Qualcomm gets stronger anyway due to licensing fees).
  - ksec 7y ago
    >Not sure about Huawei, but Samsung is not using their own modem in all of the phones they make. I'm not sure what % but they do use Qualcomm's modem in at least some of the models. That was before the settlement, and Samsung needed Qualcomm to access market with Network that was built on CDMA2000 ( Verizon ) going forward Samsung will likely be expanding their SoC across their product line. >3G is based on CDMA technology (wideband CDMA) The CDMA in reference were CDMA owned by Qualcomm or CDMA 2000, WCDMA and the China version of TDS-CDMA has cross patents agreement with other W-CDMA vendors.

ksec 7y ago

>- At the time, Qualcomm was holding most essential patents required for implementing 3G (and probably now 4G). Licensing fees are enormous burden on anyone entering the market. From what I know, you don't need any licensing to design and implement a 3G/4G/ or even 5G Modem. ( Unless you want CDMA Support ) It is the ODM or Phone Manufactures that has to take care of it. Much like you don't need a license to include H.264 decoder, not even to ship it. But you will need to pay if you decide to enable it. >only successful cellular maker I'm aware of besides Qualcomm is MediaTek Mediatek is awesome. By concentrating on low end, something Qualcomm doesn't want to do, they have an economy of scale for both Fabs Capacity, Design and Modem testing. And just a note, Huawei, assuming they will Settle with Qualcomm, and Samsung both have their own Modem Implementation. These two represent close to 40% of market. And if you include Apple down the line, that is roughly 55%. Adding Mediatek, that is close to 70%. And that is excluding BBK and Xiamoi plans to make their own modem, together they represent 15% to 20%. Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly as media likes to paint it.

nimrody 7y ago
Not sure about Huawei, but Samsung is not using their own modem in all of the phones they make. I'm not sure what % but they do use Qualcomm's modem in at least some of the models. 3G is based on CDMA technology (wideband CDMA) and does require licensing fees. It doesn't really matter whether the chip manufacturer or the phone maker pays the fees. The end result is that non-Qualcomm chips make the product more expensive (and Qualcomm gets stronger anyway due to licensing fees).
- ksec 7y ago
  >Not sure about Huawei, but Samsung is not using their own modem in all of the phones they make. I'm not sure what % but they do use Qualcomm's modem in at least some of the models. That was before the settlement, and Samsung needed Qualcomm to access market with Network that was built on CDMA2000 ( Verizon ) going forward Samsung will likely be expanding their SoC across their product line. >3G is based on CDMA technology (wideband CDMA) The CDMA in reference were CDMA owned by Qualcomm or CDMA 2000, WCDMA and the China version of TDS-CDMA has cross patents agreement with other W-CDMA vendors.