Why the Real Wireless Capital of the World is San Diego - Not Silicon Valley

Two California regions, both well known for different things, find themselves competing for the same future. And it means business – big business.

There are 6 billion people around the world with wireless phones, and only a fraction of them are smart phones. Both IDC and IMS Research predict smart phones will reach 1 billion in annual shipments as early as 2015. The new wireless mobile tablets are growing at 3 times the speed as smart phones did over the same period, with shipments expected to exceed laptop sales in the next few years. It’s clear that mobile technologies offer the greatest economic opportunity seen in the past 25 years. And if you ask most people where the heart of all this opportunity exists, they most likely will answer instinctively – Silicon Valley. But even with mobile juggernaut Apple, that instinct is wrong. Silicon Valley can lay claim to being the epicenter of a lot of technology, but wireless tech is not one of them.

“The San Diego community is not only the largest wireless community but is also the origin of the wireless industry with Qualcomm at the center of it all. Even beyond the traditional uses of wireless technologies, research institutes like West Wireless are helping to usher healthcare into the wireless age to cut costs and provide whenever, wherever health care support,” Dexcom’s CEO Terry Gregg told me when explaining why the company is located in San Diego. As it turns out, Gregg believes it’s a competitive advantage to be located at the convergence of wireless technology and healthcare – and there’s no better place than San Diego.