A century of San Diego telecom goes something like this: We had a dial-tone for 85 years or so and didn’t worry about much else. The rest is the history of telecom in San Diego.
    Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. By 1881 the San Diego Telephone Exchange had a list of subscribers with 31 names, some of which would still ring a bell — Horton, Klauber and Luce, for example. Soon, San Diego streets were lined with freshly cut telephone poles and as early as 1907 an office of the telephone company had opened in Pacific Beach.
    By the middle of the 20th century, Pacific Telephone had 100,000 subscribers. The occasion is wonderfully captured in a staged photograph of Mrs. Maxine Adiego of San Diego making the first call on the 100,000th telephone in January of 1949. A 1957 photo taken at the La Jolla telephone office highlights the introduction of color telephones. Now we can get Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy skins for our phones and wonder if this is an improvement.
    Today, there are millions of phone customers and phone lines. Pacific Bell now keeps records in terms of access lines rather than individual lines because of the burgeoning use of phone lines to provide other types of transmissions, such as fax and Internet access. No single communications entity seems to have a handle on the total number of phone users or phone lines because wire line providers do not keep records on wireless phone users and vice versa. SBC Communications, the parent company of Pacific Bell, counts 59 million access lines with 26 million of those in California and Nevada. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association keeps track of national figures for U.S. wireless subscribers and that number has reached nearly 82 million.
    For the better part of this century, as far as most consumers were concerned, telecommunications in San Diego meant Pacific Bell. But in reality, San Diego’s telecom industry always has included companies involved in research and development because of the defense industry. The commercialization of these military applications has enabled San Diego to become one of the leading telecommunications centers in the world. This is a part of the telecommunications industry that consumers rarely hear about.
    "The space race gave us the integrated circuit," says Bob Redelings of L-3 Communications' Conic division in Kearny Mesa. "The integrated circuit is what makes modern telecommunications possible." L-3 Communications includes 11 operating divisions formerly owned by Loral and Lockheed Martin. Among other things, the Conic division makes range safety equipment for satellites, systems that, using telecommunications technology, seek out and shoot down errant satellites.
    Aboard the USS Constellation in 1962 as an assistant navigator, Chuck Anderson was still using the navigational methods of generations before him. Later, as an engineer with his own company, Syntec, he worked as an agent for GE. He sold the first cell phone to the Navy here in the late 1980s. It cost $3,800. "When the government is your customer, they only want three of something and each one costs a million and a half dollars apiece," says Anderson, now retired. "But if you can figure out how to make a bunch, the price comes down and you’re in a new business."

A Pacific Telephone executive, at left, briefs San Diego military and business officials in the 1960s on the latest technology, including the PBX switchboard in the center.

    The ability of companies to take military technology and transfer it to the commercial sector has had a tremendous effect on the local economy. In 1991 San Diego County had 4,199 people working in telecommunications companies, reports the Economic Research Bureau of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce. Today 22,800 people work in the telecommunications industry. Of the high-technology sectors in San Diego (software, computers, electronics, aerospace, defense, telecom and other), telecommunications accounts for the highest percentage, or 21 percent, of total employment. Average annual wages in the sector top $48,000 — 67 percent higher than the region's average pay.
    What brought about the transformation from a focus on weapons and aircraft to an industry segment driven by wireless commercial applications?
    "Qualcomm, with OmniTRACS (its satellite-based tracking system for the trucking industry) and the development of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology has created the wireless industry as we know it." says Greg McQuerter, president and CEO of McQuerter Group, a high-tech marketing firm. "The San Diego telecom industry has just reached critical mass, and Qualcomm is an international titan in a new world, the Intel of wireless."
    Barbara Bry points to Qualcomm's leader and a college on Torrey Pines. "UCSD and Irwin Jacobs," says Bry, vice president of business development for Proflowers.com. "Irwin (who came to San Diego as a professor at UCSD) was working with military technology at Linkabit and then came up with the scrambling system that hBO uses." (Bry is one of those making a living off the technology UCSD and Qualcomm have spun off. She also is a co-founder of Atcom/Info, a provider of high speed, public Internet access, since sold and renamed CAIS Software Solutions.)
    Honing its telecom focus, the University of California, San Diego, in 1995 established a Center for Wireless Communications as part of its School of Engineering. Last year it was named for Irwin and Joan Jacobs in recognition of a generous endowment gift. The school is ranked among the top 10 of its kind in the country.

Ericsson, the world's largest telecom company, came to San Diego in a big way in 1999 when it bought Qualcomm's 1,300 employee infrastructure division and took over the San Diego Design Center.

    Irwin Jacobs is the common denominator between UCSD, Qualcomm and Linkabit, so the modern history of telecommunications in San Diego is largely his story. Jacobs came to UCSD in 1966. In 1969 he started a day-a-week consulting business with Andrew Viterbi, a professor at UCLA. "We knew so little about business," Jacobs says. "I took a year off and looked around for org charts to see how other companies made it all work."
    The pair figured it out and Linkabit became so successful it was sold to MA/COM in 1980. What followed was a multigenerational migration of people who started one new company after another and grew the telecommunications industry in San Diego. This phenomenon is reflected in the Linkabit Family Tree which has branched out considerably.
    To date Qualcomm is the largest fruit to fall from that tree. When Jacobs and Viterbi founded Qualcomm in 1985, they had no products in mind. The OmniTRACS system was their first commercial success. The revenue it supplied provided support for the development of today’s signature technology, CDMA.
    When CDMA was first introduced, it faced serious competition from the two standards already serving the wireless industry, GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) and TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access). CDMA technology had to battle for acceptance. Now it is a Qualcomm-flavored version of CDMA that will drive the next generation of wireless devices.
    The companies that can rightfully claim a branch of the Linkabit family tree now number 35, maybe more. In addition to Qualcomm, the first generation includes ViaSat, Hughes Network Systems, ComStream (Radyne ComStream), Primary Access (3COM), and PCSI (Rockwell). The second generation includes companies such as Copper Mountain, Nuera Communications, and AirFiber.
    These grandkids are very much in a growth phase. Copper Mountain went public in May and both Nuera and AirFiber raised significant venture capital in the third quarter. Five San Diego communications companies raised $83 million in venture capital in the third quarter of 1999, representing 39 percent of the period's total of $213.7 million.
    But the family tree, and the metaphor, has become inadequate to describe this veritable forest. "You need to add a segment, call it 'came to town,'" says Martha Dennis, CEO and president of WaveWare, a communications company working on data connectivity and networking for handheld computing devices. Dennis is an original Linkabit employee, and as the official unofficial keeper of the family tree, she sees the begetting getting pretty complicated. "We know we’re a center because all of the multinational companies have come to town," she says. "Nokia, Uniden, Denso, Rockwell, Sony, Intel, Motorola, Ericsson, the list grows every year. Some of the new start-ups are coming out of these companies."
    Yet in large part, the industry is still functioning as a close-knit community. "We got what we wished for," says Dennis, before correcting herself and saying, "We got part of what we wished for." Her lament is that since consolidation is the way of the world right now, many homegrown companies become part of larger corporations and are no longer headquartered locally. "My wish is that we had all ViaSats and Qualcomms, with corporate headquarters here in San Diego."
    Maybe the new metaphor could be a melting pot. There are natives and immigrants, corporate gentry and upstart start-ups. All will take part as the second century of San Diego telecom unfolds.