Qualcomm, the California-based telecom giant, is playing an aggressive game in India in both fourth generation (4G) technology and the long-term evolution (LTE) space. Chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs, who was in Delhi, talks about the company's plans in India to Mansi Taneja and Surajeet Das Gupta. Edited excerpts:
It’s been almost a year since you acquired BWA (broadband wireless access) licences in India, but the services have not been launched. When do you plan to launch LTE services?
Since we won the (licence) auction last year, we have done trials showing the technology working. We have also done inter-operator ability. Now, we are looking for commercial deployment of the network by the end of this year or early next year and the discussions with partners are also going on well.
Globally, WiMax has slowed dramatically, in India, too. It seems everybody is moving towards LTE, which is why we have made our investment.
What is the road map for launch of LTE services in India? Considering India is a very price-sensitive market, what will be the price of these handsets and gadgets?
We will launch our new chipset for LTE devices, which will work seamlessly with all the technologies. It will be out by the end of this year or beginning next year. A lot of technology is going into the making of the chip. There are ones that are high-end in the market and ones with the low end; that’s where we are focused. We are pushing towards a device cost at around $100. We will definitely get that price point in the relatively near future.
When Qualcomm entered India in the CDMA space, you talked about the clear divide in the market between CDMA and GSM. But CDMA has not happened here. Now, you are looking at both LTE and EVDO (Evolution Data Optimised, a 3G-high speed wireless broadband standard) services in India. Did something go wrong with your perception on CDMA and now are you hedging your bets on both the technologies?
No, we are not hedging our bets. It is really that we are a world wireless company, not just CDMA, so we wanted to make sure we can support the operators, no matter what technology they choose.
If you look at CDMA, operators used the fact that they had higher capacity networks and went for the low end of the market. In the early days, CDMA phones didn’t roam very well, so it was hard to get high ARPU (average revenue per user) consumers to adopt CDMA. Also, operators themselves decided they wanted to have both GSM and CDMA.
There are concerns over your support to EVDO services, as many operators in India are moving towards 4G. What kind of support system will you have for CDMA players?
There are over half a billion CDMA 2000 subscribers worldwide. It is a big market and continues to grow in handset shipments. The growth is a little slow but that is natural, as we have seen many new operators. EVDO is doing extremely well; a lot of data demand is there. The prices of devices have come down. The technology is quite mature. CDMA operators now have an opportunity with the data network. We are excited about the launch of both HSPA+ and LTE. That is why we are in both the places -- we have to support any wireless technology an operator wants. Now, it is only a question of a good ecosystem to support a specific demand for the Indian market.
There was a huge gap between the launch of 3G services in India and globally. However, now we are moving towards 4G quickly. Would it have made sense to directly jump to 4G from 2G? How do you see this whole scenario?
The key thing is that data demand is going up dramatically. So, we need to use the spectrum made available. 3G is much more mature than 4G; the prices are further down the cost curve. But not much spectrum was allocated in 3G. So, the spectrum in BWA, 3G and the existing spectrum, we need to use all, as the data demand is going to be so intense. So, it does not make sense to bypass 3G, given that it is down the cost curve already and the global ecosystem is building devices for that frequency band with that technology.
You have invested quite a lot globally in companies. But, investments in India are not a really major amount, though you say it is a critical market for you. What kind of investments are you looking at the research and development space here?
We have our own significant R&D here. We have invested in MapMyIndia, amongst others. We have a fulltime person in India for our venture funds. Our fund is not a big financial thing, it is a part of our corporate R&D organisation. We use it to make sure we see what is going on in the market, that we can provide a little bit of jumpstart to the new companies coming up.
Typically, we are not making large investments. We are relatively doing a Series-A kind of investment. We have people here, they are out in the market, talking to people to find ways to help them with not just money but also access to global markets. That is probably the right thing and we will continue to do that.
