InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

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UPDATE 1-Finnish wireless Internet plan gets court OK

Thu Feb 9, 2006 7:00 AM ET


HELSINKI, Feb 9 (Reuters) - A Finnish court rejected appeals against the award of a new wireless broadband network licence, court documents showed on Thursday, giving the go ahead to what would be one of the first such networks of its kind.

The new Flash-OFDM technology, developed by U.S. technology firm Flarion which was acquired by Qualcomm (QCOM.O: Quote, Profile, Research) shortly after the Finnish win, is designed for fast Internet access on mobile computers.

Two competitors of Digita, privately owned firms Nordisk Mobiltelefon of Sweden and Cubio, which runs a virtual mobile network in Finland, appealed to the Supreme Administrative Court against the state's decision to award the licence to Digita last summer.

Both of the rival firms tried to win the licence for developing a broadband network based on current CDMA cellphone technology, developed by Qualcomm.

Flash OFDM, which is designed purely for Internet Protocol data traffic and which claims to offer superior speeds at lower cost, has only recently been selected for commercial networks in the United States, Finland and Slovakia.

"As the decision came now ... we are aiming to have the service running this autumn as we have targeted earlier," Digita Chief Executive Sirpa Ojala said.

"We have been preparing ouselves for the launch ... have looked for potential operators for the network and have followed closely the development of Flash OFDM as it's not the main technology for the vendor (Qualcomm) any more," she said.

Digita has said it aims to build the first part of the network, covering sparsely populated areas, by September 2006, with the whole of the Nordic country covered three years later.

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