“Speaking to telecoms.com at the ITU 2006 conference in Hong Kong this week, MaryBeth Selby, working committee advisory chair board chair at the FLO Forum, said that the focus of the group at the moment was to change any perception that FLO is a US-centric technology…Hinting that Qualcomm had learned a hard lesson through its protection and control of the CDMA standard, Selby said that the formation of the FLO Forum 18 months ago was a deliberate attempt to push the development of FLO out from under Qualcomm’s wings. “This is not a Qualcomm only solution,” said Selby.”
That’s going to be a fairly tricky thing to do, and any claims that Qualcomm has “learned a hard lesson” will ring hollow while most of the industry (in Europe at least) think they’re gouging their 3G patents for all they’re worth.
Anyway, Softbank has joined the forum, which already includes KDDI.