Third Generation and Mobile Internet Standards and Competition in Third Generation Infrastructure and Phones

This chapter shows how the hybrid model of committees and markets continues to explain standard setting in third generation and mobile Internet standards better than a model that only employs one or the other mechanism and it uses the hybrid model to also forecast competition between infrastructure and phone suppliers. As discussed in Chapter 3, the hybrid model of standard setting explains the choice of DoCoMo’s W-CDMA technology by ETSI in January 1998. The subsequent patent disagreements and subsequent agreement between Ericsson and Qualcomm to license each other’s patents along with the harmonization efforts can also be explained in terms of the hybrid model. On the surface, the patent disagreements between the two firms were largely played out in a committee-based battle both between the two firms and in the larger committees that are concerned with third generation standards. But the agreement was strongly affected by the market success of cdmaOne and Ericsson’s growing realization that it needed a cdmaOne infrastructure business. Further, the rising expectations of market success for cdmaOne were strongly affected by committee-based competition in the form of the US government’s pressure on China to adopt cdmaOne.