dailywireless.org » Qualcomm Buys Flarion

Qualcomm Buys Flarion

Hedley Lamarr : My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.
Taggart: God darnit Mr. Lamarr, you use your tongue prettier than a twenty dollar whore.

Tom’s Networking, Light Reading and the Washington Post say Qualcomm is buying Flarion, the mobile broadband wireless vendor.

Qualcomm will pay approximately $600 million in cash and stock, including the assumption of options and warrants at fair value. QUALCOMM may also pay an additional $205 million in the form of cash and QUALCOMM stock.

The acquisition, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected later this year.

Nextel wrapped up their test of Flarion’s system this June. The North Carolina market trial, in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill region, used Flarion’s Fast Low-latency Access with Seamless Handoff (FLASH-OFDM) and was generally reviewed as successful.

Flarion, based in Bedminster, N.J., was launched in 2000 with investments from Lucent Bell Labs and venture capitalists. The company also has offices in London, Tokyo, Sydney and Singapore. Om Malik interviewed Rajiv Laroia, CTO and founder of Flarion. They discussed Qualcomm, Europe and how the 450 Mhz band is a big opportunity for the company.

The acquisition of Flarion “will give Qualcomm added strength to compete against Motorola and other suppliers that plan to offer their own 3G and WiMAX designs,” S&P Equity Research said.

“Both companies are doing well on this deal,” Deutsche Bank Bank analyst Brian Modoff said. “Flarion investors are getting a good exit strategy and Qualcomm is continuing to have a strong patent portfolio.” The combination could be bad news for developers of future versions of WiMax, an emerging high-speed wireless technology which includes chip giant Intel among its most prominent backers, behind, Modoff said.
Developers of mobile versions of WiMax could have a “difficult time designing their systems for mobility without infringing Qualcomm patents” as a result of the deal, he said.
Qualcomm executives told analysts on a conference call that they believe the combined company’s patents apply to WiMax.

Wi-Lan claims it was THEY who have the rights to COFDM, having acquired the original patent rights for spread spectrum technology from Hedy Lamarr in June 1998.

Note: Steve Stoh has much more on his wonderful story on Hedy Lamarr:

The patent purchase was a symbolic and very generous gesture on the part of Wi-LAN. The patent had long since expired, so the intellectual property in the patent had lapsed into public domain. It’s purely speculation on my part, but I suspect that Wi-LAN learned that Lamarr was living very modestly at the end of her life, and decided to “do the right thing” by helping out the inventor of FHSS. For that they are to be commended; as far as I’m aware, Wi-LAN was the only BWIA or WLAN company to formally recognize Lamarr for her FHSS patent.

Steve Stroh also points out that Wi-LAN says it has acquired controlling rights to patents that it claims are fundamental to implementing WiMAX-certified systems.

Greg Raleigh says he invented the version of OFDM used by 802.16. In the 1990s, he founded Clarity Wireless, the first company to ship an OFDM fixed wireless data link. Raleigh is now CEO of Airgo Networks, the MIMO pioneer.

Runcom pioneered many OFDMA silicon solutions in 2000, many of which were adopted in large part, by both WiBro and 802.16e (Mobile WiMax).

Mobile WiMax and Flarion will likely be direct competitors. The two technologies are different, but both use OFDM.

Intel needs WiMAX to succeed because it counters the control on markets by Qualcomm. Mobile WiMax can use unlicensed frequencies, commodity chips, provides a degree of backware compatibility with 802.16-2004 and can use a single channel.

Flarion is a proprietary system that provides higher speed handoff than Mobile WiMax but Flarion requires licensed duplex channels. It isn’t a “standard” but is widely seen as a leading contender for 802.20, which might be.

Everyone prefers standards, but cellular companies have made little progress with 802.20 standardization. Instead, they pursued their own EV-DO and HSPDA upgrades on their cellular networks. Many cellular operators, such as Sprint, appear to be jumping the 802.20 ship, climbing on board the WiMax train. Qualcomm will likely try to make Flarion the “defacto” standard for 802.20. Only someone like Motorola or Qualcomm might have the clout to pull it off.

Competitors like Motorola, Siemens, Nokia, and Sony-Ericsson, may push back - adopting 802.16e to avoid Qualcomm royalties.

Flarion uses a variation of OFDM, called Flash-OFDM which varies the OFDM “tones” over a frequency range. They say it reduces doppler problems and allows for faster handoff at speed. It’s also said to be the basis of the 802.20 standard.

Qualcom developed CDMA, a spread spectrum-based approach now the dominant mode for cellular carriers in the United States (used by Verizon and Sprint). Even GSM-based Cingular and T-Mobile may move to the CDMA-based “3G” standard W-CDMA - a competitor to OFDM-based “4G” systems like WiMax and Flarion.

OFDM proponents say OFDM is more effective in handling multipath and it’s more spectrally efficient. There is no upper limit to the data speed you can achieve with OFDM. OFDM will always provide twice the capacity of CDMA, claims Hatim Zaghoul, CEO of Wi-LAN, which holds many OFDM patents.

What’s OFDM

Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM), sometimes called discrete multitone modulation (DMT), is based upon the idea of frequency-division multiplexing (FDM), sending multiple signals at different frequencies. An OFDM baseband signal is the sum of a number of orthogonal sub-carriers.OFDM spaces multiple carriers very close together (until they actually overlap). By finding frequencies that are orthogonal, or perpendicular in a mathematical sense, they can overlap without interfering with each other.

By removing guard bands, more space is available for data. It is also able to overcome multipath and frequency-selective fading due to its parallel nature. Inexpensive Fast Fourier Transform chips demodulate the signal, and combine their output into zeros and ones.

Mobile Data Architectures
802.16e	802.20	3G
IP 802.16a mobility (more than 1Mbps)	IP roaming & handoff (more than 1Mbps)	Circuit-switched cell data (less than 1Mbps)
Extentions to MAC and PHY from 802.16a	New MAC and PHY with IP and adaptive antennas	W-CDMA & CDMA-2000
Backward compatible with 802.16-2004 (if newly modified chips are used)	Optimized for full mobility	Evolving GSM or IS-41
Between 2-6 GHz	Licensed Bands below 3.5 GHz	Licensed Bands below 2.7 GHz
Packet Architecture	Packet Architecture	Circuit Architecture
Low latency	Low latency	High latency

Flarion is the leading contendor for the 802.20 standard, but there several hurtles 802.20 will have to overcome:

It can only be used in licensed bands below 3.5GHz.
It trails the 802.16e standards process by a couple of years
Who needs 180 mph handoff?
Mobilized 802.16e will be nationalized in Korea.
OFDM (Multiple Access), used in WiBro, allows simultaneous upstream access on the same channel, providing better QOS for voice on a single channel, mitigating the need for a separate upstream channel of Flarion/802.20.

Qualcomm, the Big Daddy of CDMA, also chose OFDM for their 700 Mhz MediaFlo system to provide multi-media entertainment to mobile users. The nationwide network is scheduled for completion by 2006.

The IEEE expects to publish the 802.16e standard by the end of the year. IEEE 802.16e can use both licensed and unlicensed bands as well as simplex or duplex configurations. Along with mobility support, 802.16e adds several features to the PHY, including OFDMA (Multiple Access), a scalable FFT size (proportional to channel, up to 1000 OFDM carriers) and better Forward Error Correction schemes. It doesn’t play nice with 802.16-2004.

One subtle advantage of single-channel Mobile WiMax could be MIMO and adaptive beams; wrangling two channels on Flarion’s duplex system may make beamforming a challenge and handsets more expensive.

Flarion has been selected as the equipment provider for a nationwide 450MHz network launch in Finland.

Many countries have only 4 MHz of spectrum in the 450 MHz band, leaving room for only a single wideband channel, explains Flarion. By opting for CDMA, carriers and governments are limiting themselves either to voice and narrowband data with CDMA 1X or data only with 1X EV-DO. With EV-DO rev. A — which will add VoIP capabilities — still years off, Flash-OFDM is emerging as a prime candidate for the spectrum, offering voice and broadband data today, says Flarion in a Telephony article.

Flarion claims FLASH-OFDM currently delivers the highest sustainable uplink performance of any technology, and so delivers the highest VoIP capacity, currently 31 calls in 1.25MHz of paired spectrum. Future enhancements to FLASHOFDM will further increase the uplink and downlink capacity.

Flarion says (pdf) that a 450MHz cell site can reach up to 50km (30 miles). An operator can deploy a network with up to 75% fewer cell sites than cellular at 2 GHz, making broadband data (and IP voice), ubiquitous and cheap. Flarion has an OEM partnership with Siemens to address the 450MHz market.

Flarion says Netgear will provide integrated FLASH-OFDM/Wi-Fi products. A NETGEAR WAR314 access point provides local WiFi with an integrated Flarion backhaul. Siemens will have 450MHz terminals in 2006. Flarion has its own line of PC Cards and Desktop modems that are available today at 700MHz, 800MHz, 1.9GHz, 2.1GHz and 2.3GHz.

Flarion’s technology also is being used in The Netherlands, Tokyo; Washington, D.C.; and Australia. Flarion’s Flexbeam can pack broadband bits into narrow channels on the 450 MHz or 700 Mhz band for 2-way broadband on the go.

Who’s going to offer a Flarion/cellphone? Sprint and Clearwire have committed to Mobile WiMax. A public service play at 700 Mhz with Aloha Partners may be possible. But lacking licensed frequencies in the United States, the market for a Flarion/cellphone will most likely be overseas.