SDTelecom

Information on the
San Diego Telecommunciations Industry

Origins

The origins of the San Diego telecommunications industry date to the relocation of Linkabit Corporation from Los Angeles (Westwood) to San Diego (Sorrento Valley) in July 1971. At the time, the dominant source of communications engineering talent was MIT, supplemented by Los Angeles-area schools such as USC. The growth and visibility of the regional economy, however, date to the founding of Qualcomm in 1985, and its establishment of the CDMA mobile phone standard. Both firms were co-founded by Irwin Mark Jacobs and Andrew James Viterbi, who at the time of Linkabit's founding (1968), were professors at UCSD and UCLA, respectively.

The regional economy began to expand rapidly in the late 1990s with the Telecom Act of 1996 and thus the brief rise of CLECs, as well the U.S. adoption of digital cell phone technologies and a broader adoption of wireless technologies such as 802.11 (WiFi). This growth brought the creation of the Center for Wireless Communications in 1995 and the San Diego Telecom Council in 1998. However, the demise of the CLECs and collapse of telecommunications infrastructure orders brought several difficult years from 2001-2004.

Key Websites

Research

Research on the San Diego industry include:

• San Diego Telecom Industry blog
• Digitizing Communications, a forthcoming book on the region
• San Diego Wireless Valley research project

Other sources of information include

• David Mocks’s The Qualcomm Equation
• San Diego Union-Tribune business news pages
• The San Diego Metropolitan monthly magazine

Organizations

Trade associations and consortia

• CommNexus (formerly the San Diego Telecom Council, née SDTelecom.org)
• Center for Wireless Communications at UCSD
• Connect (née UCSD Connect)

Publicly traded companies

• Qualcomm
• ViaSat