Introduction: This article takes you through the magnificent history of mobile communication!
Modern life is inseparable from mobile communication. From the generation, transmission to the reception of information, there are countless brilliant wisdoms behind network communication. The evolution from 1G to 5G has witnessed one era transition after another. The disputes over communication standards behind it have also been tumultuous and extremely intense, ultimately forming a magnificent history of mobile communication.
The King of 1G Simulation – MOTOROLA
When it comes to two-way wireless communication, Motorola cannot be left out. If AT&T was once the king of wired communication, MOTOROLA was the pioneer of mobile communication.
Initially, wireless communication technology was mainly applied in national-level aerospace and defense industries, with a military flavor. The development of MOTOROLA was no exception.
MOTOROLA was founded in 1928. During World War II, it signed a contract with the United States Department of War to assist in the development of wireless communication tools. In 1941, MOTOROLA developed the first epoch-making product, the SCR-300, which remains the most classic image of American communication soldiers in movies to this day.
Although the SCR-300 weighs 16 kilograms and even requires a dedicated messenger to carry it on its back or to be installed on vehicles and aircraft, due to its use of FM frequency modulation technology, the communication distance has reached an unprecedented 12.9 kilometers, which is sufficient for artillery observers to contact artillery positions and also enables ground forces to communicate with Army aviation.
Whether it was the communication equipment during World War II, the first color television set after that, semiconductor chips, DSP communication Mobile Phone chips, or the “big brother” invented in 1980 and the establishment of the AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) telephone system…
MOTOROLA, as a leader in analog communication technology, is a market pioneer in both mobile communication and computer processors. In 1989, it was selected as one of the world’s most forward-looking companies.
Unfortunately, this once-mighty giant ultimately failed to transform along with market trends and eventually collapsed.
The dispute between 2G GSM and CDMA
Due to the poor call quality and confidentiality as well as unstable signals of 1G analog communication, people began to develop new mobile communication technologies. In the late 1980s, as the application of large-scale integrated circuits, microprocessors and digital signals became more mature, mobile operators at that time gradually shifted to digital communication technology, and mobile communication entered the 2G era.
As the communication industry is a strategic national industry, the competition over communication standards is a comprehensive contest among countries and alliances. Once the losing party has to continuously pay high patent fees to the other alliance and is more likely to be seized the initiative in the industry by the other party.
MOTOROLA monopolized 1G, which also meant that the first generation of communication standards was in the hands of Americans.
When digital communication was just getting started, European countries realized that it would be difficult to compete with the United States in terms of technology if they went it alone.
For the past two decades, the European Union has never been willing to lag behind the United States. If each of them comes up with a different standard, it will be very difficult for them to gain a dominant position in the world (standards are something that the one with the most people, the one who speaks loudly and has the strongest fists wins; you can’t be the only one in the world using a different standard from others).
They learned from the failure of acting independently, strengthened internal alliances, and finally surpassed the United States in the 2G era.
Since 1982, the European Post and Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has established the “Mobile Expert Group” to be responsible for the research of communication standards.
The name of GSM is the abbreviation of Groupe Special Mobile. Later, the meaning of this abbreviation was changed to “Global System for Mobile communications” to promote GSM worldwide.
The core technology of GSM is Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), which is characterized by evenly distributing one channel among eight communicators. Only one person can speak at a time, and each person takes turns to use 1/8 of the channel time.
The drawback of GSM is its limited capacity. When users are overloaded, more base stations must be established. However, the advantages of GSM are also prominent: it is easy to deploy and adopts a brand-new digital signal coding to replace the original analog signals; It also supports international roaming and provides SIM cards to enable users to store personal data when changing their phones. It can send text messages of 160 characters in length.
It can be said that the technology and application of mobile communication made astonishing progress during the 2G era.
In 1991, Ericsson and Nokia were the first to set up the first GSM network on the European continent. In just ten years, 162 countries around the world have built GSM networks, with over 100 million users and a market share as high as 75%.
While Europeans were ambitiously aiming to surpass the United States and dominate the world, Americans simultaneously developed three communication systems. Two of them are also based on TDMA technology, while the third one is the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology launched by Qualcomm.
The channel of TDMA is only for one person to use at a time, and eight users have to take turns to use it, with limited capacity. However, CDMA adopts encryption technology, allowing everyone to speak simultaneously without being heard by others (for instance, No. 1 can only talk to No. 1, and No. 2 can only talk to No. 2, without interfering with each other), significantly enhancing its capacity.
Technically speaking, the capacity of CDMA systems is more than ten times that of GSM.
Since the 1950s, CDMA has been one of the communication technologies of the US military. Under the leadership of founders Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi, Qualcomm successfully applied CDMA to mobile communications in 1989.
However, Qualcomm has no actual experience in mobile phone manufacturing, and European operators are also not interested in its intellectual property rights. Even in the United States, only a very small number of operators are willing to use this system.
Early reports on CDMA were rather negative. Base stations failed to achieve the expected performance and CDMA mobile phones were nowhere to be bought. Overall, it’s all talk and no action.
Meanwhile, Europe made significant investments in GSM and established an international roaming standard within just a few years, widely deploying GSM base stations around the world.
Naturally, CDMA started a step later than GSM. Coupled with the fact that domestic resources in the United States were scattered, CDMA lost most of its territory.
In the 2G era, CDMA was a failure. On the other hand, the failure of the United States in the competition for communication standards has indirectly affected the competitiveness of MOTOROLA mobile phones.
When digital mobile phones gradually replaced analog ones, MOTOROLA still held a 40% share in the analog mobile phone market, but less than 20% in the digital mobile phone market.
MOTOROLA underestimated the lifespan of analog phones in response to the threat of digital communication. At that time, its executives stated: “43 million analog phone users, there’s no way to go wrong!”
Just as AT&T was reluctant to invest in its cordless phone division at the beginning, MOTOROLA’s most profitable and loudest analog phone division is even less likely to channel its resources to the digital phone division.
The same story can also be seen in the subsequent competition between Nokia and smartphones. The fall of corporate giants is rarely due to a single external factor; rather, it is mostly caused by internal friction within the enterprise, which leads to slow technological advancement.
In 1997, MOTOROLA finally stepped down from its pedestal, and its global mobile phone market share plummeted from 50% in 1997 to 17%. MOTOROLA, which had enjoyed 20 years of glory, was finally defeated by Nokia, a company that was still making paper and only launched its first digital mobile phone in 1992.
The patent landmines of 3G Qualcomm and the disputes over the three major standards
As mentioned earlier, Qualcomm’s CDMA technology outperforms the EU’s GSM TDMA technology in both capacity and call quality. However, GSM was deployed earlier and rapidly rolled out globally in a short period of time, resulting in CDMA being all talk and no action at that time. Qualcomm was also once in crisis.
But in the 3G era, the situation reversed. What exactly is the reason?
Let’s first talk about the history of Qualcomm.
- Qualcomm’s patent landmine
Entering Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego, California, a thick patent wall greets you, embedded with nearly 1,400 patents held by Qualcomm related to mobile communications.
This is the famous “Qualcomm Patent Wall”.
Everything about Qualcomm is clearly written on this wall: wealth, monopoly, success… Qualcomm is like a venomous snake, well-versed in the way of strangling its host and reaping huge profits.
During the Cold War, the communication method used by the US military could encrypt and decrypt information, known as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology, to ensure that information would not be stolen by the Soviet Union during transmission.
Linkabit is the first electronic communication technology company in San Diego, California, responsible for undertaking this order and developing satellite communication and wireless communication technologies for the US military and NASA.
The two founders of Linkabit were both leading figures in the field of Communication. Irwin Jacobs taught in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His book “Principles of Communication Engineering” laid the foundation for communication at that time and even now. It remains the Bible of the communication industry to this day.
Another founder, Andrew Viterbi, proposed the famous Viterbi algorithm.
In 1980, Jacobs and Viterbi sold Linkabit to M/A-COM, which was also in the field of communication, and founded Qualcomm in 1985, meaning QUAlity COMMunications.
In 1989, Qualcomm significantly improved the power issue of CDMA and successfully commercialized it.
Unfortunately, at this time, the European Institute for Communication Standards had already begun to formulate GSM technical standards, which were soon implemented in the European and Japanese markets.
The Communications Industry Association of the United States also recognized the TDMA technology adopted by GSM as the 2G standard. Although CDMA has a larger capacity and better call quality than TDMA, its technology is more complex, and most operators do not believe in the feasibility of the technology.
One of the key factors in Qualcomm’s development lies in Jacobs’ three cunning and unpredictable patent troll tactics:
1) Creating landmines: Establishing a monopolistic patent layout
Qualcomm has built a CDMA patent wall around technologies such as power control, co-frequency multiplexing, and soft handover. Compared with other manufacturers, it has a very significant advantage in both the quantity and quality of patents.
But Qualcomm is not content with this. It wants to enjoy this huge profit all by itself.
At Qualcomm, a large team of patent lawyers no less than the R&D department has been cultivated. Through patent wars such as mergers and acquisitions and lawsuits against rivals for patent infringement, all CDMA-related patents have been gradually gathered over.
The duties of a patent lawyer include applying for patents, negotiating patent prices, and suing infringing companies.
The second step is to apply for a large number of junk patents, using junk patents to guarantee its core patents – applying for new patents before the expiration of the protection of the old patents, or applying for a large number of CDMA peripheral patents, and then declaring the technology as part of the new technology, blocking all technologies related to the internal and external aspects of CDMA.
2) Laying landmines: Incorporating patented technologies into communication standards
It’s not enough to collect all the patent landmines; we also need people to step on them.
First of all, it is necessary to understand why communication standards are needed? You can’t let China Telecom fail to reach China Mobile’s mobile phones or Huawei fail to reach iphones. The purpose of formulating a unified communication standard is to enable interconnection and interoperability among different operators, base station equipment and mobile phones.
As the GSM standard was jointly proposed by European operators and equipment manufacturers (such as Ericsson and Nokia), and they share the intellectual property rights together, the patents are basically open.
However, Qualcomm ostensibly proposed a 2G standard based on CDMA technology, but in reality, it hid its CDMA patent technology within it. This means that when using this 2G standard, one would be stepping on Qualcomm’s patent.
This kind of behavior of monopolizing a certain standard with the patent of a single company should not occur in a communication standard-setting group composed of members from various countries. Other countries and manufacturers, due to their own conflicts of interest, will surely strongly oppose it.
However, at that time, 2G research was just getting started, and most manufacturers’ attention was still focused on the GSM standard proposed by Europeans. Qualcomm’s CDMA technology was not widely discussed, which instead allowed Qualcomm to take advantage of the situation and enter the market.
3) More landmines: Integrating CDMA algorithms into chips
Qualcomm’s final move is to embed the CDMA algorithm into the integrated chip. Its most prominent feature is the integration of signal transmission and reception, power management and digital-to-analog conversion on a single Chip, which is what we call SoC (System on Chip) today.
As a result, mobile phone manufacturers using Qualcomm’s patents must first pay a licensing fee to obtain the right to use the patents. After the chips or products are mass-produced, a certain percentage of the product’s selling price will be charged based on the shipment volume. On average, a royalty ranging from 5% to 10% of the mobile phone sales revenue needs to be paid.
This is quite unreasonable – components such as the screen, lens, and casing, which have nothing to do with CDMA, should still be deducted a percentage of their sales revenue. If a diamond is set in a mobile phone, does the profit still have to be attributed to Qualcomm?
At that time, Qualcomm provided a complete solution for SoC. Most mobile phone manufacturers did not have the technical capability to integrate SoC and could only obediently take this cut.
Even if you set a trap, there must be someone willing to step on it. The high threshold of Qualcomm’s patents has blocked its competitors and also hindered the rapid marketization of CDMA. Most operators still chose the GSM system. Qualcomm, which relies on patent royalties to survive, is not doing well in the United States.
At this point, Qualcomm received an olive branch – from the South Korean government.
Before the development of CDMA, the manufacturing industry of communication equipment such as operators and mobile phones in South Korea was rather weak. In November 1990, Qualcomm and the Electronic Communications Research Institute (ETRI) signed an agreement on the transfer of CDMA technology.
Qualcomm has promised to hand over 20% of the patent fees it collects in South Korea each year to the Korea Electronics and Communications Research Institute to assist in its research. The South Korean government has also announced that CDMA is the only 2G mobile communication standard in South Korea and fully supports South Korean companies such as Samsung and LG in investing in the commercial application of CDMA technology.
South Korea did not align with Europe, which supports GSM, and chose CDMA as the 2G standard mainly for the sake of low patent benefits. Although it took on certain risks, it eventually reaped corresponding rewards.
Through the development of CDMA, the penetration rate of mobile communication in South Korea increased rapidly. Within just five years, the number of mobile communication users reached one million, and SK Telecom became the world’s largest CDMA operator. Communication equipment manufacturers have emerged as a powerful force. Samsung has become the world’s first exporter of CDMA mobile phones.
CDMA not only drove the development of South Korea’s telecommunications industry, but also promoted the entire