Alps Electric Co Ltd and its San Jose, California-based affiliate company, Alpine Electronics Inc, are to form a joint venture company with Qualcomm Inc to develop and manufacture digital cellular telephones and other wireless products based on Qualcomm’s CDMA, Code Division Multiple Access technology: CDMA is claimed to have the potential to provide a 20-fold increase in the capacity of the cellular telephone system; multiple calls are spread across a segment, said to provide fewer cell sites, better multipath resistance, and enhanced voice quality; Qualcomm is preparing the final phase of testing to validate CDMA digital cellular technology, and plans to bring CDMA-based, digital cellular telephones to market by mid-1992; Personal Communications Networks Dual-mode telephones will be developed to operate on analogue systems as well as the digital systems and future products will be developed for wireless data communications.
