Vendor lineage
Qualcomm - a trucking service paid for the mobile network
Founded 1985; funded its CDMA research with a satellite messaging system sold to hauliers.
Qualcomm was founded on 1 July 1985 in San Diego by seven people who had left Linkabit, led by Irwin Jacobs, and named for quality communications. It began as contract research for government and defence.
The sequence that made it is worth stating in order, because it is the opposite of how these companies are usually described. Its commercial product was OmniTRACS: satellite messaging and positioning sold to long-haul trucking companies, launched in 1988. The profits from tracking lorries paid for the research into code-division multiple access that became the basis of a generation of mobile networks.
The technical bet underneath that is the interesting one. The industry was moving toward time-division multiple access, which divides a channel by time; Qualcomm argued for dividing it by code instead, so that every transmitter uses the whole band at once and separation is done by mathematics rather than by scheduling. That is a harder engineering problem and a better use of spectrum, and being right about it is most of the company’s history.
Its place on a networking timeline is direct. The wireless silicon in a great many access points and home gateways carries the Atheros name it acquired, and the modem in a handset is where the mobile network actually terminates. One of its founders also gave the industry the Viterbi algorithm, which decodes convolutional codes and sits inside the physical layer of a very large amount of equipment described elsewhere on this site.
- Qualcomm (Wikipedia): founded 1 July 1985 in San Diego by Irwin Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi, Franklin Antonio and others; subsidiaries include Qualcomm Atheros, CSR, Ikanos, Nuvia and Arduino
- Qualcomm proxy statement filed with the SEC: Irwin Mark Jacobs, one of the founders, served as chairman from the company’s start of operations in July 1985 and as chief executive from July 1985 to June 2005
- HandWiki, drawing on published histories: Qualcomm was established by seven former Linkabit employees and named for quality communications; it began as a contract research and development centre for government and defence work, merged with Omninet in 1988 to produce the Omnitracs satellite communications system for trucking companies, and Omnitracs profits helped fund its research into code-division multiple access for cellular networks; it grew from eight employees in 1986 to 620 in 1991