Wireless Bureau Warns ITC of Peril to Consumers from Chipset Ban
Consumers will suffer if the International Trade Commission (ITC) bans import of cellphones with Qualcomm chipsets, as Broadcom and a Commission judge want, the FCC said. Wireless Bureau Chief Fred Campbell’s warning came in a filing to the ITC before hearings last month on how the Commission should punish Qualcomm for infringing Broadcom patents. The filing wasn’t cleared with other Commissioner offices, sources said.
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Campbell said the FCC understood that a “broad exclusion of downstream products” would “likely cover the importation of all EV-DO handsets currently available” for sale in the U.S. market, as well as new EV-DO models and a “non-trivial” percentage of WCDMA handsets available in the U.S.
Consumers would feel the ban, Campbell said. “Exclusion of downstream products would have a considerable impact on American consumers, dramatically curtailing their choice of mobile handsets and services,” he said: “In the many markets where only EV-DO networks have been deployed, customers wishing to subscribe to mobile broadband services would only be able to do so through use of non-excluded devices, such as PDAs or special modem cards inserted into laptop computers.” These devices “tend to be bulkier and more expensive than ordinary mobile telephone handsets, and most consumers do not view them as substitutes for mobile handsets.”
Excluding any handsets would “further delay deployment of mobile broadband networks in markets where neither technology has yet been deployed, as well as consumer uptake of mobile broadband services in these markets,” Campbell said. Handsets offer a far greater opportunity than PDAs or notebook PCs, so “exclusion of handsets would reduce carriers’ incentives to continue roll out EV-DO networks in additional geographic markets,” the filing warned.
There was concern on the 8th floor because other offices didn’t know Campbell was making the filing, sources said. One source said the other offices realize that Chmn. Martin has some discretion on these types of filings.
“It strikes me as not unreasonable that the FCC would file something if it felt a decision could have an adverse impact on competition or consumers,” an industry source said: “I have heard this happened without a lot of people in the [FCC] building knowing about it… But there’s not a procedure for this kind of thing. You wouldn’t expect the Commission to vote on something like this, so how would you do it?” The FCC Commission should examine a process for clearing such comments before weighing in with other agencies, the source said.