Wireless giant Qualcomm a winner in India

By Mike Freeman, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
June 11, 2010 at 9:52 p.m.

Qualcomm was a surprise winner Friday in a broadband spectrum auction in the emerging India market for next-generation wireless services, paying $1.045 billion for coverage in regions that include the large cities of Delhi and Mumbai.

The San Diego wireless giant said it bought the 2.3-gigahertz spectrum to accelerate the build-out of fourth-generation LTE — Long Term Evolution — wireless networks, the kind that can deliver fast Internet connections to mobile devices.

Analysts found the spectrum purchase puzzling.

Qualcomm makes chips that run wireless phones and other devices. In most cases, it’s wireless carriers that buy spectrum — the radio frequencies over which voice and data services are delivered.

In the past when Qualcomm acquired spectrum, it had a specific service in mind that no one else was likely to provide immediately. An example is spectrum Qualcomm bought in 2003 for the Flo TV mobile television service.

But LTE isn’t so nascent. It already is being rolled out elsewhere, including in the United States by Verizon. So LTE probably would have found a foothold in India without Qualcomm, said Iain Gillott, president of industry research firm iGR in Austin, Texas.

“Normally they do this when they want to seed a market with something,â€