back to article Qualcomm offers concessions to secure NXP Semi takeover

Qualcomm is hoping it can cut a deal with the European Union to get the go-ahead for its multi-billion NXP Semiconductors acquisition. The European Commission page tracking progress in the acquisition says the vendor filed commitments on October 5, but doesn't detail what the company is offering. The filing was enough to set …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not good enough

    Not good enough.

    The key job of a regulator is to maintain competition. All merger conditions on Qualcom so far have failed to do so.

    Example - Qualcom took over Atheros in 2011. In 2011 we had a relatively healthy mix of WiFi socs for routers and CPEs. While Broadcom was clearly the 800lb gorilla, its place was contested.

    5 years later there is f*** all competition in the market - it is 95%+ Broadcom now, because Qualcom has cherry-picked some of the Atheros IPR to go into the WiFi portion of their SoCs and killed the rest.

    The biggest sufferers by the way are open source projects - from having 60%+ of high end devices on the market supportable by OpenWRT we are down to 0. Not a single tri-band router you can buy on Amazon has any open source support. Even in the trunk of OpenWRT (or LEDE for that matter).

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not good enough

        Not quite 0:

        OK. Near zero.

        All branded ones, however, are now Broadcom with no open source support.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Not good enough

          >> All branded ones, however, are now Broadcom

          https://wikidevi.com/wiki/List_of_802.11ac_Hardware/Access_Points

          would contradict this.

          There are more Atheros devices listed than broadcom ones.

          Perhaps dsl took off and wifi only chipsets lost relevance and broadcom do wifi+dsl and wifi+cable integrated socs. Back in 2011, they were commonly separate chips and so atheros wifi only ones had more relevance.

          Perhaps OpenWrt is dying off.. separate chips are easier to handle than multi function socs.

          Meanwhile actual data suggests qualcomm atheros is doing better since the merger

          I suppose now the argument will be that the atheros merger hurt broadcom's market share and so the merger is a bad idea.

  3. Lysenko

    It's also worth mentioning that NXP only just acquired FreeScale, so this is really a three way acquisition/merger.

    1. bazza Silver badge

      And Freescale had a dominant position in telephone exchange equipment with PowerQUICC. And there's still some niche users of their PowerPC range of CPUs who will want guaranteed supply (i.e. Uncle Sam, who has a way of insisting on these matters,,,),

      NXP do a whole load of stuff that I can't see Qualcomm being interested in at all. Worrying times.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like