WHITHER IP WIRELESS?--GOOD TECHNOLOGIES GET REINVENTED...

Sharon Armbrust | August 15, 2006, 06:08 PM

That makes two venture-backed technology innovators that have foundered passing through Sprint Nextel's testing portals for a 2.5 GHz solution. First came Flarion, which was spurned by Sprint in 2005 after apparent successful trials in Raleigh-Durham, NC. And last week IP Wireless became the second promising candidate to eat Sprint's dust.

Sprint's Aug. 8 announced choice of the Intel-championed WIMAX as the 4G technology of choice for its undeveloped 2.5 GHz spectrum was more or less pre-announced by the UMTS TDD Alliance in its Aug. 4 news release bemoaning the expedient choices that network carriers often make when wooed with hard cash and promises by powerful vendors, pursuing their own best interests. The editorial piece which headlined the UMTS TDD Alliance's website maintains that inside Sprint the technologists are TDD backers but that the "business-centric" (read: stock market oriented) execs can't resist the "massive hype engine and financial incentives."

IP Wireless has other test and commercial deployments outside the U.S., so it isn't left totally empty-handed. But its small size and limited funds make it, like Flarion, a David-like competitor for the likes of Goliaths like Intel championing WIMAX.

But then look what happened to Flarion. Qualcomm picked up it up on the rebound (announced Aug.05, closed Jan.06) for $600 mil. and stacked its patent portfolio with a whole new layer of CDMA patents that mobile network builders will have to acknowledge as carriers upgrade to 3G-4G levels. In the fiercely competitive race for advantage among tech vendors, IP Wireless' respected TDD-CDMA solution could be headed for a similar reorg.