Qualcomm Adds Femtocell Capabilities to Wi-Fi Products for Corporate Networks

In the five months since San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) completed its acquisition of San Jose, CA-based Atheros Communications, the two companies have been working to integrate their operations and combine their technologies.

One example of how that’s playing out came into focus yesterday, with Qualcomm saying it has combined its proprietary Femtocell modem chipset with Atheros’ Wi-Fi and Ethernet product lines.

Atheros already held a dominant position as a provider of Wireless local area network (LAN) equipment, according to Irvind Ghai, director of enterprise marketing at Qualcomm Atheros. Atheros has been making its Wi-Fi products under the brand names of other electronics manufacturers, targeting “enterprise” customers who operate corporate, hotel, and other wireless networks, Ghai says.

Adding Qualcomm’s femtocell to the Wi-Fi box expands the capabilities of wireless networks, enabling its customers to offer an improved product and eliminates the necessity of working with separate distributors for Wi-Fi and cellular products, Ghai says. It’s also a smart tactical move, as the iPad and other tablets can connect to either a Wi-Fi or cellular network.

The integrated Femto-Wi-Fi design enable Qualcomm’s customers to create access points that let their enterprise network customers connect to both Wi-Fi and cellular networks through a single gateway, enabling users to access services via either technology. While Qualcomm’s designs will initially target enterprise networks, the products can be scaled down for residential applications or scaled up for outdoor metro applications.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.