Policy bias driving Reliance to GSM: Qualcomm

CDMA technology pioneer Qualcomm today defended the royalty structure of its technologies and said the present spectrum policy was driving Reliance Communication towards GSM technology.

"Qualcomm's understanding of the situation is that the spectrum policy in place in India is driving Reliance to rethink its technology evolution path. The spectrum policy allocates roughly twice as much spectrum to GSM operators as is given to CDMA operators," executives of the company said in a conference call.

At the call, Qualcomm (India and Saarc) President Kanwalinder Singh, Senior Vice-President (marketing) Jeffery K Balk and Vice-President and Division Counsel Mike Hartongs fielded questions from the media.

They said though Qualcomm could not comment on any operator's choice of technology path, but while evaluating its path Reliance should include the costs of deploying and running new networks.

"Reliance is already on CDMA 2000, a 3G technology. All the major operators in the world have deployed 3G networks. Reliance also needs to take into account that it could use its existing 3G (CDMA 1X) network to deploy compelling services using its spectral efficiency rather than going back to 2g(gsm)," the company's executive's said.