Until September 24, 2001, every CDMA telephone call ever made went through a cel- lular base station with a Qualcomm chipset or a chipset requiring a license from Qual- comm for use of its CDMA chipset patents. On that date, an innovative piece of equip- ment, a software-based radio base station developed by Advanced Communications Technologies, Inc., established a call to a standard cdmaOne cellular phone. If this tech- nology succeeds, then it could create software-based radio base stations that cost per- haps 25 percent less than standard base station radio equipment and, very important, can be upgraded by software releases instead of requiring chip replacements. Even though Qualcomm holds and licenses the patents currently required to create chipsets for CDMA, the international CDMA standard is independent of Qualcomm. This is an example of how standards support innovation and increase competition. 9.1.6 The role of standards organizations Standards organizations are subject to a great deal of political lobbying by businesses with billions of dollars at stake. Some of the organizations, such as the ITU, ANSI, and Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. General Cellular Standards General Cellular Standards IEEE, seek to be unbiased. Others seek to promote one technology aggressively, mount- ing publicity campaigns and seeking to influence governments. At the same time, standards committees are composed largely of engineers and tech- nical experts from the industry. Even when there is no effort at pressuring the com- mittee, each company's level of interest in the committee and its decisions has a sig- nificant effect on the quality of the committee. If a company feels that the problem the committee is addressing is real and important, it is likely to send its best engineers to solve the problem. If the solutions are sound, the com