To upgrade the tv in the GSM house, you need to remove the old house, but you can keep the foundations, and build a new one from the floor up while changing the power supply from DC to AC.
To upgrade the tv in the cdmaOne house, you just plug in the new tv and put up a new antenna.
Now there's a misleading analogy.
To upgrade from GSM to W-CDMA/UMTS you mostly buy new radios and get new spectrum. You run GSM in the old spectrum and W-CDMA in the new. But the backbone of the network remains essentially common for UMTS and GSM, much the same way the ANSI-41 is common for CDMAOne, CDMA-2000, IS-136 TDMA and AMPS.
For CDMA2000 you get to keep your old spectrum, but you still have to replace the radio. But you do have the advantage of replacing, or upgrading, the radios instead of adding, or essentially duplicating, the radios.
People tend to forget about the network infrastructure, but it is a significant investment - significant enough to be a major obstacle for moving from GSM to CDMA2000 or from CDMAOne to W-CDMA. |
