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By Tony Hallett, 12 November 2003 10:20

NEWS Qualcomm is set to up its presence in Europe, evangelising the move to 3G mobile networks with a clear message - speed is the great enabler.

In London this week to brief analysts on another set of strong figures for chipsets shipped, the Californian communications equipment company said it will be "helping out with lessons learnt".

Jan Dehesh, VP at Qualcomm's Enterprise Market Development division, said: "I will be doing a lot of travelling back and forth. We will certainly have more presence in Europe."

The move is somewhat surprising given Qualcomm's role as an intellectual property and components supplier, and Europe's historic position as a fortress of GSM - traditionally the main rival to Qualcomm's CDMA worldwide.

However, a Qualcomm spokesman said the company "will be doing some evangelising for 3G itself", telling users and carriers what can be achieved with speeds as high as 500-600Kbps, gained from user experience of its CDMA 1xEV-DO in some parts of the US and South Korea.

Qualcomm, despite backing this rival to the W-CDMA 3G standard in Europe, stands to make money from every 3G phone sold across the continent because of royalty payments. It has recently opened a Nuremberg office to complement fast-growing bases in London and Farnborough, where it has an R&D facility.

With players such as Ericsson and Nokia focusing increasingly on the enterprise - and how to make money from taking large user organisations to operators - Qualcomm said it will be following suit.

However, whereas those organisations and others such as Lucent, Nortel and Siemens preach integration with companies' PBX phone systems, Qualcomm denied the closure of Wireless Knowledge - its one-time joint venture with Microsoft - was a blow.

"We educated [users] on what they could do," Dehesh added. "But now with the speeds [users can get over cellular], bluntly speaking a lot of that knowledge won't be necessary."