Comments on: Qualcomm cell phone ban to take effect

Qualcomm loses latest battle to reverse the International Trade Commission's import ban on its technology, says it will continue the fight.

[morton101]

well

this just shows that the people who have the rights to decide what technology we use are not as smart as we hoped

[hecknotechno]

empty well

This just shows that the people that use technology we make aren't as smart as we hoped. If you do a little research, you will find that the lack of chips from ONE supplier will not prohibit the 3G rollout. The others with original technology will fill in just fine.

[martindawson]

Drastic improvement in accuracy?

There?s an emphasis on this affecting public safety in this article?

I?d like Judith Woodhall to explain just how accuracy is ?drastically improved?. The ACMA in Australia made some unjustified comments in their cellular location white paper back in 2004 that ?reliable location determination? wouldn?t be available until 3G networks were deployed. Actually, 2G networks have much more mature and widely deployed location services support?

SUPL, which is about the only location determination mechanism that could benefit from additional user plane bandwidth, isn't actually suitable, or used, for standard switch circuit emergency calls. Ironically, SUPL has been somewhat responsible for the delay in the implemenation of control plane location service support in WCDMA and CDMA2000 network controllers so things like OTDOA, UTDOA, and AGPS haven't been available for standard emergency calls until relatively recently.

Anybody got a view on how this drastic improvement in accuracy is going to be delivered by these phones? Is it just a presumption that 3G networks will have smaller cells?

[jawinterb]

misleading article

As someone that has been deploying location systems in the US cellular market for more than 5 years now I find this article quite misleading.

The ban is in place against handsets containing certain Qualcomm chipsets that breach a patent owned by Broadcom.

This has little impact on overall public safety. High-accuracy positioning techniques are not used in the routing of calls to the public safety answer point (PSAP) as their response time is generally deemed unacceptable. Assisted GPS (A-GPS) and other higher-accuracy positioning techniques are not restricted to 3G technologies. A-GPS and UTDOA technologies, for example, are both deployed in a number of 2G and 2.5G networks for E911 throughout the United States.

The article seeks to imply that without 3G handsets containing Qualcomm chipsets that 3G deployments can't continue. While I will agree that Qualcomm are a major manufacturer of such chipsets they are certainly not the only game in town, and that the embargo on Qualcomm related products does not halt the rollout of all 3G handsets.

[maksenf]

The sky is falling

See the subject line.

[Quemann]

No impact on public safety

Yes, you are right about it. Even DHS said they did not find any imminent public safety risks resulting from the import ban. Even the Brattle Group's purely economic viewpoint is misleading in terms of technological viewpoint. The Brattle Group should have calculated the economic damages resulting from Qualcomm's obstinacy and refusal to admit the validity of Broadcom's battery-saving patent. What if a third party would infringe on Qualcomm's patents, saying the Qualcomm patents are invalid.