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How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

arstechnica.com

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Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#111

Post by cwilkes »

Analemma_ wrote: post #104
tooltalk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery? Sure, without QCOM's IP, other non-wireless parts of the phone won't add/contribute as much value or drive market demand for the phone.

But they're adding a fixed amount of value regardless of the phone, and so they should get a fixed sum per phone. This business where they get a percentage of the retail price is ridiculous. Consider the 64 GB iPhone XS selling for $1000 vs the 512 GB one for $1349. Is Qualcomm adding any extra value to the second phone as compared to the first one? Obviously not, so why should they capture any of the extra purchase…

If they just charged a flat rate then no low end phones would use their tech as it would eat more heavily into their profit.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#112

Post by aey »

Analemma_ wrote: post #104
tooltalk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery? Sure, without QCOM's IP, other non-wireless parts of the phone won't add/contribute as much value or drive market demand for the phone.

But they're adding a fixed amount of value regardless of the phone, and so they should get a fixed sum per phone. This business where they get a percentage of the retail price is ridiculous. Consider the 64 GB iPhone XS selling for $1000 vs the 512 GB one for $1349. Is Qualcomm adding any extra value to the second phone as compared to the first one? Obviously not, so why should they capture any of the extra purchase…

Yes, because the value of the 512gb without the qualcomm modem is lower than the 64GB version.

Free market pricing is based on demand of the feature not the cost to make it. Qualcomm should be pricing the part at the point where the phone without the qualcomm part is equal value per dollar.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#113

Post by lostlogin »

aey wrote: post #86
guardiangod wrote: post #19

As a former worker at Blackberry(RIM) cellular chip division (hello fellow RCT-ees), this article explains so much it physically hurts me. RIM pushed hard to develop its own chip 3G/4G chips because Qualcomm absolutely strangled the company with its licensing cost/terms. They pretty much demanded a separate cellular R&D team (QCT) that duplicates half the effort. All CDMA based phones must contain chips from QCT beca…

I don't think Qualcomm strangled RIM with their 3.4% (peak!) licensing fee on the selling price of the phone. If RIMs profit margin was 3.5% they had bigger problems. Here is the thing. If Apple sold a 2G network based iPhone with a non Qualcomm IP modem, and a 4G iPhone at 2x the price with a Qualcomm modem, which one would make more money for Apple?

Im inclined to think that there is a third choice.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#114

Post by henryfjordan »

pier25 wrote: post #53
conception wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LG is the only supplier of apps for their TVs and forbids any competition there.

So?

So does LG take a 30% rake of all app sales? It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to take advantage of that fact with non-competitive pricing.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#115

Post by aey »

Retric wrote: post #105
tooltalk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery? Sure, without QCOM's IP, other non-wireless parts of the phone won't add/contribute as much value or drive market demand for the phone.

Ehh, the original cellphone patents had already expired at that point. QCOM’s IP had arguable direct value only representing improvements to existing tech. Their business model existed largely via the mismatch between cellphone companies and wireless carriers.

Yea, my point exactly. All the recent IP covers improvements since 2G. Apple can try to sell a 2G network connected iPhone based on expired IP without the Qualcomm tax.

Free market pricing is based on demand of the feature not the cost to make it. Qualcomm should be pricing the part at the point where the phone without the qualcomm part is equal value per dollar.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#116

Post by systemBuilder »

guardiangod wrote: post #19

As a former worker at Blackberry(RIM) cellular chip division (hello fellow RCT-ees), this article explains so much it physically hurts me. RIM pushed hard to develop its own chip 3G/4G chips because Qualcomm absolutely strangled the company with its licensing cost/terms. They pretty much demanded a separate cellular R&D team (QCT) that duplicates half the effort. All CDMA based phones must contain chips from QCT beca…

Qualcomm charges the same 4-5% patents price to license to EVERY manufacturer. You have no idea what you are talking about. They did a 3%(domestic sales) - 7%(exports) deal in China because it was a poor country in the early 2000's and they demanded it but Chinese makers later switched back to the 4-5% deal.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#117

Post by dreamcompiler »

mschuster91 wrote: post #44
derefr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm. Seems strange, given that plenty of manufacturers are making the radios on the other side of the cellular connection. Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio?

> Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio? Workable maybe but not power efficient, which is crucial in mobile. That takes years to figure out and is the reason why ARM is so utterly dominant on mobile - there simply is not any Intel x86 offering even close to the power envelope of ARM, even after years of ARM…

Intel could probably do it if they had the luxury of redesigning their instruction set. They're stuck with supporting an overly CISC-based instruction set whose roots date back to the early 1970s. ARM didn't have that problem and designed a much more modern RISC-like instruction set which requires a lot less power.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#118

Post by aey »

lostlogin wrote: post #113
aey wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Qualcomm strangled RIM with their 3.4% (peak!) licensing fee on the selling price of the phone. If RIMs profit margin was 3.5% they had bigger problems. Here is the thing. If Apple sold a 2G network based iPhone with a non Qualcomm IP modem, and a 4G iPhone at 2x the price with a Qualcomm modem, which one would make more money for Apple?

Im inclined to think that there is a third choice.

Yea. Apple can build its own. There is nothing wrong with them spending their 200b+ in cash on integrated modem tech.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#119

Post by systemBuilder »

pier25 wrote: post #34

So why did Apple decide to make its own SOCs but not its own modem chips? I would expect making CPUs and GPUs to be a lot more difficult than modems, no?

No, handoff design is more difficult than picking and tuning ALU designs from the 70 years of CPU design history, then generating the control circuitry.

A lack of design-for-handoff OF ANY SORT is why Intel failed with 802.16. Qualcomm invented soft handoff which made frequency reuse 3x more efficient, and it made CDMA possible. People are pretty ignorant that due to shadow fading you have to keep 3 or more MACIDs active on different base stations and use high speed feedback control to hand off roughly every 1.6 seconds. I statistically analyzed drive testing logs for 1x-EV-DO at Qualcomm to produce one of the world's first handoff markov models, as part of OFDMA handoff design for Qualcomm.

A lot of practical experimentation goes into cellular system design in the most challenging handOff locales on Earth - San Diego and Hong Kong.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#120

Post by kyrra »

sriram_sun wrote: post #66
guardiangod wrote: post #19

As a former worker at Blackberry(RIM) cellular chip division (hello fellow RCT-ees), this article explains so much it physically hurts me. RIM pushed hard to develop its own chip 3G/4G chips because Qualcomm absolutely strangled the company with its licensing cost/terms. They pretty much demanded a separate cellular R&D team (QCT) that duplicates half the effort. All CDMA based phones must contain chips from QCT beca…

I know one person who works in that team. Said he was driving to lunch and heard the news that Apple and Qualcomm had reached a deal. So he buys a few Qualcomm shares (he sold them at peak!), gets back to work and then this e-mail shows up saying Intel is getting out of the 5G modem business. I'm paraphrasing here: "The sight of a whole floor of heads popping up from their cubes at the same time... what an experience…

My bet is that Apple buys Intel's modem parents and hires most of the staff from Intel that was doing modem chips. Apple already has a team that is likely working on this.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/03/apple-modem-iphone-intel/

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