Qualcomm to buy Flarion for $US600m

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 10 September 2005 15:27

IT Industry - Deals

CDMA pioneer, Qualcomm, has announced plans to acquire broadband wireless developer, Flarion Technologies, a pioneer of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Access (OFDMA) technology and the inventor of FLASH-OFDM technology for mobile broadband IP services. Qualcomm will pay approximately $US600 million. Qualcomm CEO, Dr Paul Jacobs, said: "We believe CDMA will provide the most advanced, spectrally efficient wide area wireless networks for the foreseeable future, but with Flarion we can now more effectively support operators who prefer an OFDMA or hybrid OFDM/CDMA track for differentiating their services."

OFDM has been promoted as the basis for wireless networks beyond third generation. Qualcomm claims a leading patent position in CDMA and W-CDMA technology, and its acquisition of Flarion could give it a similar position for any 4G technology based on OFDM.

Flarion' proprietary technology has been trialled extensively by operators around the world, but it has to date announced just two commercial rollouts: in Zagreb in June and in Finland in July.