I think that the worst possible mistake you can make is to look at the lab results and project market success from the absolute, theoretical data transfer speed.
My impression is that "absolute, theoretical" speeds come from the CDMA camp, whereas GSM quotes tend to be closer to what the expected user rate will be.
I think we will end up recognizing that mobile phones are still consumer products. And consumers aren't engineers. What GPRS in America will have is the full Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens model range that was originally designed for the massive Europe/Asia market. If the 1XRTT phone competition initially consists of Kyocera, Samsung, Neopoint and LG I have my own ideas about which way the US consumers will break.
The thing that needs to be kept in mind is that evolution from IS-136 TDMA to GPRS/EDGE does present a small technical discontinuity. IS-136 TDMA isn't trivially compatible with GPRS the way GSM is. My understanding is that the "standard" data evolution for IS-136 TDMA is to an GPRS/EDGE-like channel, but with the signalling necessary to be backward compatible with IS-136 TDMA. GSM/GPRS sets won't work on IS-136/EDGE networks and vice versa. Will all the manufacturers supporting GSM/GPRS also support IS-136/EDGE?
It's this discontinuity that creates a small opportunity for CDMA, but I'm not aware of any defined evolution path. It would probably have to be a wholesale conversion. Either way it's probably significantly more expensive convert to CDMA than to evolve or even completely convert to a GSM/GPRS environment. But for IS-136 TDMA providers it's a conversion either way. |
