At first glance, you might think things aren't looking too rosy for Qualcomm, the chipset maker / patent holder extraordinaire that has a penchant for suing, getting sued, and developing "standards" that run counter to popular support. After all, the Broadcom patent infringement suit is dragging on with no end in sight -- and now this, a report from ABI Research analysts suggesting that its answer to LTE and WiMax in the 4G race, Ultra Mobile Broadband, could come up short. The problem isn't that UMB's performance sucks -- quite the contrary actually, with speeds allegedly topping out at 288Mbps downstream -- but rather that no major carrier has signed up to implement it. Indeed, CDMA stalwarts like Sprint and Verizon have both turned to alternatives for their next-gen networks, and it certainly doesn't help that LTE has the GSM Association's full blessing and support. Then again, Qualcomm claims that it'll be doing plenty of royalty collectin' regardless of what 4G tech wins out, so we're not ready to prep the obit just yet.

Not quite a year after EV-DO Rev. C became more commonly known as Ultra Mobile Broadband, we're now hearing that the official specifications have been published. Reportedly, the UMB specification should be "quickly converted into an official global standard by the 3GPP2 organizational partners," and with it should come "peak download data rates of 288Mbps in a 20MHz bandwidth." Notably, the release states that multi-mode, multi-band UMB devices will "leverage the existing 3G CDMA device selection to preserve economies of scale," and it's scheduled to become widely available on a worldwide basis during the first half of 2009.

[Via RCRWirelessNews]

Does a theoretical max of 280Mbps (yes, we said two hundred and frickin' eighty megabits per second) downstream to your phone sound good? Yeah? Then get familiar with this name: "Ultra Mobile Broadband." That's the catchphrase the CDMA Development Group has chosen as its go-to-market term for the set of standards supported by EV-DO Revision C, the latest proposed evolution of CDMA2000 1xEV-DO. Of course, we have to wait for EV-DO Revision B -- with its mere theoretical 73.5Mbps down -- to come and go first, meaning that UMB is lining up for 2Q '07 standard finalization and a commercial introduction some time in the wee months of 2009. Not to be a buzzkill or anything, though, Cingular; we're sure we're going to love your 7.2Mbps HSDPA just fine.

[Via Geekzone]