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.

In a wrap-up of the state of 4G networks over at BusinessWeek, the battle between the three competing 4G network standards -- WIMAX, Long Term Evolution (LTE), and Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) -- is appraised, with WIMAX clearly edging out its other rivals. This could be a two horse race before long if Verizon chooses to back GSM's successor LTE over CDMA's sequel, UMB. That would leave Qualcomm without one of its most significant backers for CDMA's spiritual sibling, although it'll do just fine thanks to the multiple 4G patents it holds. Ultimately though, in all of this space there's very little discussion about what the consumer wants: do we really need two or three different standards that probably won't inter-operate, leaving us back at the square we've always been at? Frankly, for all the benefits that 4G is purported to bring, we'd like something a little more imaginative than the usual bickering amongst the big shots.

Update: Although it didn't come from VZW, last month Vodafone's chairman Arun Sarin made it clear that Verizon will go for LTE. Bad news for UMB!

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]

It looks like any hopes that the 4G intellectual property landscape would be a little less of a Qualcomm-controlled minefield are fading fast. Thanks in part to recent acquisitions, a senior vice president pointed out in a recent interview with IDG that the company now owns over 1,000 patents pertaining to OFDM, OFDMA, and MIMO -- technologies which'll prove crucial to 4G data, regardless of the standard(s) that ultimately win out. In other words, whether the networks of tomorrow are banging LTE, UMB, or some flavor of WiMax, Qualcomm's confident that it's in a position to cash in, just as it's doing now. Sorry, Nokia.

[Via mocoNews]

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]