Verizon WCDMA ???
lml,
<< I did a "google" & came across several articles such as this one .... 3gnewsroom.com >>
There is no question that back around the date of that article (June 2001) there was considerable speculation that Vodafone would dictate an eventual WCDMA migration path for Verizon although that speculation seemed to subside rather quickly (which doesn't mean it is dead).
As a matter of fact, in my archives is a Powerpoint presentation Denny Strigl made to the Goldman Sachs Global Wireless Communications Conference on May 9, 2001 that has a slide titled "Network Evolution: 1XRTT to 3G Options." It shows the respective Verizon and Vodafone paths thus:
Verizon: IS95 --> 1xRTT --> 1xEV
WCDMA
/
/
Vodafone: GSM --> GPRS --> EDGE
I suppose that potential WCDMA migration path could still be in the works and discussions could still be ongoing between Vodafone and Verizon since Vodafone has a put option to pull out of Verizon.
3GPP does plan to downband WCDMA to the 850 MHz bandwidth (which is what the Verizon former BAM/NYNEX northeast spectrum inventory primarily consists of) but that will take some time. On the other hand Verizon did just add 10 MHz of spectrum covering 47 million POPs in New York City, Boston, Columbus, Hartford, Providence, and Minneapolis, from Northcoast in 1900 MHz. I'm not sure Northcoast had much of a buildout but what they did buildout was CDMA. 10 MHz would certainly be enough in major markets to buildout WCDMA.
Verizon and Lucent are quite tight and Lucent is no doubt talking to them about their COPS gateway, but I haven't heard all that much about COPS in the last year.
Qualcomm does, of course plan to offer chipsets enabling CDMA2000/WCDMA phones eventually (GSM GPRS/1xRTT for starters), and although I doubt that it is a priority for them, Nokia potentially could I suppose since they have a 1xRTT protocol stack as well as the GSM GPRS & UMTS stack, and they are definitely touting a CDMA2000/WCDMA infra side convergence solution as a future.
A few months back Denny did state that Verizon would offer a GSM/CDMA Worldphone this year (although I suspect that might be early next year). here is the slide he used as a backdrop to that statement:
investorshub.com
Time will tell. It's a possibility I suppose and a test site or 2 at this stage is not out of the question.
If you ever run across the article you are talking about I'd like to see it.
Best,
- Eric - |
