IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

Even before we had a chance to get a handle on what 3G is (it's still not even in my local market), wireless providers are starting to tout their 4G technology.

Earlier this month, Sprint announced their plans for a 4G offering based on WiMax, and now Samsung wants to play, as picked up in the Om Malik Samsung 4G article. At first glance this seems to be driven from the opposite end of the market compared to usual, doesn't it? Normally it starts with a wireless technology and standards, hardware manufacturers build radio antenna's, and once service providers start to think about deploying them they get a handset manufacturer on board to make a handset that will work with the radios. So what in Samsung doing trying to drive adoption from the opposite side?

Om left a little bread crumb in his blog that I followed:

Taking a longer term view, it seems that everyone from Samsung to Siemens is looking to escape from under Qualcomm’s yoke, and take better control of their destiny.

So, I did some digging and found an earlier article from Om on how Qualcomm picked up Flarion. Flarion has patents on a technology called OFDM, or Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. Basically what that amounts to is the ability to take a source radio signal that has bounced and reflected off of buildings and other objects and to recombine these scattered radio signals back into a single strong signal. It is a key technology in both WiMax and WiFi (802.11 pre-N) that allows it to work without a direct line of sight and to deal better with signal interference.

So the answer seems to be that other companies are looking to play the same game that Qualcomm did and get their hands on some alternative technology and intellectual property that won't involve paying royalties to Qualcomm for the use of their patents. It's all starting to make sense. If Samsung wins, I wonder if they'll get out of the handset business like Qualcomm did?