Qualcomm has dropped the development of its successor to CDMA technology Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) and will re-focus its 4G effort on LTE.

UMB was to have been Qualcomm’s proposal for the 4G technology standard, but no major operator decided to adopt it.

Instead, LTE and Wimax are the two contenders to be the 4G standard.

It is thought that Qualcomm’s allegedly excessive charges for CDMA licenses, after agreeing to license CDMA on ‘fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory’ terms following the international community’s widespread adoption of CDMA as the 3G standard, combined with what was regarded as an aggressively litigious stance towards the rest of the industry, led to the wireless industry shunning UMB for 4th generation networks.

As Europe’s leading semiconductor analyst, Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons, put it: “You only get one chance to screw the industry.”