They must have been looking at Voicestream roaming revenue growth and doing some calculating. 1xrtt may be superior if you choose to ignore the roaming angle. But I'm not sure there is a reason to ignore the roaming issue.
The issue here's that IS/95 CDMA, like TDMA, traditionally operates over an ANSI-41 core. Thus a 1x overlay, or a 3x rollout in the 700 Mhz. band (assuming that this band becomes ready for use sometime before hell freezes over), could be done without building an entirely new core network from scratch, something that isn't possible with GSM or W-CDMA rollouts; and even if standards were created so as to allow such overlays/rollouts to take place via an ANSI-41 core, "regular" GSM and/or W-CDMA handsets wouldn't be able to work over such a network, and thus a carrier wouldn't be able to benefit from roaming revenues to the same extent that, say, Voicestream currently can.
Also, in the case of W-CDMA rollouts, the fact that it makes use of 5 Mhz. channels could be a problem given the, uh, technicalities involved with 700 Mhz. spectrum deployments, resulting from the fact that these bands are currently occupied by TV broadcasters. For example, if a carrier wins a 10 Mhz. block of spectrum within this band, but is only able to initially clear out 8 Mhz., then the use of W-CDMA would mean that 3 Mhz. of cleared spectrum would go to waste until the issue's resolved. On the other hand, since cdma2000 utilizes 1.25 Mhz. channels, in such a case, only .5 Mhz. of clear spectrum would meet such a fate.
Eric |
