San Diegans already have become presumptuous in their expectations that Qualcomm Inc. will keep growing, hiring their brothers, sisters and friends, and will keep funding their favorite causes and charities. But that’s the Qualcomm of today.
    The Qualcomm of tomorrow is facing a major hurdle in its efforts to bring online the next generation of wireless services. Smug European nations and industrialists have been caught off guard by the wild advance of Qualcomm's CDMA around the world. Now they are looking to stunt Qualcomm's growth by forcing that the next generation of wireless technology, known in the industry as 3G or Third Generation, be completely new and not at all "backward compatible" with existing systems.
    The move is a thinly veiled strike on Qualcomm's strong patent positions and the untapped potential in the CDMA systems being installed today. If Europe and Japanese interests prevail, Qualcomm and other CDMA providers will have to go back and resell and rewire all their existing customers.
    That's fine for the Europeans, since their existing system already is operating near peak capacity, so there's little room for improvement. By using government intervention to force on the world an incompatible standard, Europe's manufacturers, primarily Ericsson, would be able to go head-to-head with Qualcomm for markets Qualcomm already has won.
    Only three years have passed since Qualcomm deployed cdmaOne technology in Hong Kong, and since then it has become the dominant digital wireless telephone technology in the United States, Korea and Mexico, and has been deployed throughout Canada, Asia, Latin America, Africa, Russia and Eastern Europe. In those same three years, Qualcomm became San Diego’s largest manufacturing employer. Later this year, cdmaOne will be launched in Japan and Australia. CdmaOne is now the world's fastest-growing wireless technology with 12 million users and a projected 100 million users in the year 2001.
    Still, Western Europe, with one of the world's most mobile and wealthiest markets, remains married to the older GSM technology.
    On June 30, the United States filed its 3G wireless standard proposals with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva. Included is cdma2000, the proposal of Qualcomm and the U.S.-based CDMA Development Group. Cdma2000 is backward compatible, equally friendly to all current wireless networks. So existing CDMA and GSM technologies will operate just fine when cdma2000 is deployed to converge newer and faster applications, from voice to Internet to video.
    But as promised, the European and Japanese interests submitted a proposed standard known as W-CDMA that is purposefully incompatible with existing CDMA systems. The decisions of the ITU will be critically important to San Diego.
    As John Major, executive vice president of Qualcomm and president of its Wireless Infrastructure Division, shared with the House Science Subcommittee on Technology last month, a little history is instructive.
    In 1982, the European Conference of Posts and Telecommunications (CEPT) formed the Groupe Speciale Mobile (GSM), a committee to develop a second-generation cellular system for Europe, because member countries were using incompatible analog cellular systems.
    "Remember that the GSM was not trying to develop an advanced cellular system; it was only trying to develop one that would facilitate pan-European roaming," says Major. "Innovative technologies that offered significant technical benefits, such as CDMA, were rejected because the European planners concluded that such systems were not mature enough to meet the planned 1991 target date for GSM.
    "The operators from the CEPT countries signed a memorandum of understanding, later called the GSM MoU, in which they all agreed to deploy the new GSM standard in the same frequencies to facilitate roaming between European countries. In 1989, CEPT transferred the GSM committee to ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute). ETSI completed the specifications of the system in the late 1980s and the commercial service was initiated in 1992.
    "Once Europe had its common cellular standard, it changed the game from legitimate technical standard setting activities to an exclusionary industrial policy that would enable European manufacturers to market GSM around the world from a protected home market base. The first thing it did was to redefine the term GSM. The new name was Global System for Mobile Communications. It then changed the nature of the GSM MoU, expanding the membership to include all operators 'committed to building and implementing GSM-based systems and government regulators/administrations which issue commercial mobile telecommunications licenses,' and broadening its scope and objective to promote GSM as a standard around the world."
    Europe embarked on a policy of denying GSM competitors entry into its market, most obvious in the emerging personal communications services (PCS).
    "When the various European governments began allocating spectrum for PCS, each had the opportunity to allow the new operators to offer service using any available technology, including CDMA," Major recalls.
    "Did they encourage ETSI to open its process to consider new technologies such as CDMA? Did they even allow the new operators to use non-ETSI technologies?
    "They did neither.
    "Instead, they urged ETSI to upband the now-old GSM technology to the new frequency band and mandated that the new operators use this upband GSM technology."
    To do otherwise would have weakened the position of GSM manufacturers who no longer would enjoy a protected market at home.
    Meanwhile, the U.S. welcomed competition among digital standards and allows GSM to operate domestically, giving American consumers a choice and competitive pricing, which European consumers lack.
    Similar principles of competition and choice in the development and deployment of 3g technologies will best serve all the world's consumers. That such principles of openness also will best serve San Diegans and Qualcomm is a parochial irony that Europeans probably will not savor.
    Qualcomm is investing a fortune to employ the right talent to persuade the ITU and other appropriate parties to level the playing field and not fix it in favor of European manufacturers. This is a federal and international game. Please ask your congressman to come up to speed and intervene. And the next time you see a Qualcomm executive, at least offer an encouraging word.