What is verizon doing with 800MHz? (fcc website)

[Conan Kudo]

I thought Qualcomm had basically stopped charging a premium for CDMA capability. Thought the Qualcomm pitch was now something like "you can buy from no-name semiconductor over there, or you can pay only a few pennies more and get a genuine Qualcomm chip, and as a bonus, it is also CDMA capable."

No. Qualcomm can't do something like that, since CDMA royalties make up most of its revenue. While the royalties for its OFDMA related inventions aren't insignificant, they are far smaller than the ones for CDMA technology. And inventions for E-UTRA and UTRA FDD/TDD are required to be offered under FRAND terms, so Qualcomm doesn't make nearly as much money on it as it does for cdmaOne/CDMA2000 technology.

[bigsnake49]

Nobody is making CDMA chipsets except for Qualcomm and if they are they are not selling very well. The number of CDMA operators in the world is rapidly shrinking so their CDMA royalties from operators is also shrinking. Verizon is rapidly deploying VOLTE so that pool of money will also be shrinking fast. Soon it will be just Sprint. Qualcomm is making their money from chipsets and they are making a hell of a lot of money.

[WiWavelength]

No. Qualcomm can't do something like that, since CDMA royalties make up most of its revenue. While the royalties for its OFDMA related inventions aren't insignificant, they are far smaller than the ones for CDMA technology. And inventions for E-UTRA and UTRA FDD/TDD are required to be offered under FRAND terms, so Qualcomm doesn't make nearly as much money on it as it does for cdmaOne/CDMA2000 technology.

Nobody is making CDMA chipsets except for Qualcomm and if they are they are not selling very well. The number of CDMA operators in the world is rapidly shrinking so their CDMA royalties from operators is also shrinking. Verizon is rapidly deploying VOLTE so that pool of money will also be shrinking fast. Soon it will be just Sprint. Qualcomm is making their money from chipsets and they are making a hell of a lot of money.

 

Neal, unless you show an itemized financial statement to the contrary, you are way off, and bigsnake49 is right.  Qualcomm is a wildly successful, multi billion dollar business.  Qualcomm could not be that successful and have CDMA2000 royalties make up most of its revenue, since CDMA2000 operators and subscribers are declining -- as many of you like to point out.  No, Qualcomm makes most of its money from selling millions upon millions of baseband, processor, or combination chipsets -- some of which are 3GPP only, some of which are 3GPP/3GPP2, and some of which are non cellular.

 

AJ