| When Qualcomm and CDMA first appeared on the world scene, they both were hailed as the future of the wireless industry. Today, though, CDMA still lags GSM in the number of subscribers with CDMA having 480 million subscribers while GSM has 3.8 billion. CDMA also saw subscriber growth of only 29 million people the year ending March 2009. Most recently, Nortel, a key major CDMA infrastructure supplier, has declared bankruptcy and sold its CDMA assets to Ericsson, at one time the arch enemy of CDMA. With the exit of Nortel from the CDMA infrastructure market, the major CDMA infrastructure companies remaining are Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola. Will Qualcomm and CDMA be able to survive with only these infrastructure suppliers? Will the Chinese infrastructure companies be able to substitute for Nortel? Will Ericsson's and Alcatel-Lucent's heavy dependence on GSM prejudice their product development and marketing? And what about Nokia? Will Nokia assist in the migration to 3G CDMA or will it try to protect its installed base of 3.8 billion GSM subscribers? |
