Sequans: The Startup That Started Over

Transitioning from WiMax to LTE CAT 0

Junko Yoshida, EETimes
12/15/2014 01:00 AM EST

PARIS — Early one Paris morning in July 2011, Georges Karam, president and CEO of Sequans Communications, got a call from HTC, Taiwan's leading mobile handset vendor and Karam's biggest customer. The caller asked Karam to stop shipping Sequans' WiMax radio chips -- which had been designed into HTC's then very popular EVO phones supplied to Sprint in the United States.

The reason for this catastrophic cancellation wasn't immediately clear to Karam. But later in the morning he learned that Sprint, the only major U.S. cellular carrier with no iPhone offerings, had decided to drop HTC and go with Apple. Sprint's sudden change of heart made obsolete HTC's two new mobile phones, scheduled for the fall of 2011 and early 2012. As HTC's chip supplier, Sequans, too, was instantly obsolete.

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