Market power and anti-competitive practices in CDMA?


Posted on January 3, 2007  /  1 Comments

CDMA has been a major force in helping drive down per-line costs of telephony.  Has this been possible even with excessive royalties extracted by Qualcomm? 

Qualcomm Under Scrutiny by Korean Antitrust Agency – New York Times

The South Korean antitrust agency has formed a task force to investigate the licensing and business practices of the wireless technology company Qualcomm, the latest in a string of legal battles for the company, officials said on Tuesday.

In Japan, Europe and the United States, Qualcomm, which is based in San Diego, faces accusations by rivals that it has abused its market dominance in wireless technology to demand excessive royalties and block fair competition.

Qualcomm is known for developing code-division multiple access, or CDMA, wireless technology, which is a rival standard to the global system for mobile communications, or GSM, technology. It makes money by selling chips that power cellphones, as well as collecting royalties or licensing its technology to other chip makers and cellphone manufacturers.

1 Comment


  1. High royalties are at the heart of the dispute between Indian CDMA operators, mainly Reliance and Tata Indicom, and Qualcomm.

    http://www.lirneasia.net/2006/07/indian-spectrum-policy-flawed-according-to-qualcomm/