Diana, TDMA seems to be heading quickly to extinction. All CDMA or GSM now. The http here is the CDMA Forum address where Bill Frezza, one of the GSM Nazis, hangs out inventing his own reality and misrepresenting what others say. But even so, it is a good discussion group, so readers might like to visit. It takes ages to scroll down though. Not as good as SI.
cmp.com
I went to the trouble of putting the following there, so copied it here.
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Ira, It's all looking pretty good for IS95 CDMA by Qualcomm since it now takes a 10 mb program to help differentiate between CDMA and other options. No longer is it a matter of it WON"T work, it is now a matter of "if we run this very tricky financial model and allow also for a little bit of unknown quantity, then it might be better to stick with GSM, get some money in the bank, then hope to catch up later".
There are performance gurantees on offer, which Lucent provided when Motorola backed off, so the technical risk is low. It really then comes down to price negotiation. CDMA infrastructure is being priced at something like 3 times GSM equivalent bits and pieces, but my information on that is not very certain. That isn't because it inherently costs that much to make the stuff, it is just what the market will bear. The higher price is reward for technical superiority and being first to have infrastructure supply available. The buyer then has to take a punt - go with that, or drop back to tried and sometimes truthful GSM.
It is a finely balanced judgement - there isn't enough CDMA gear to go around, so the highest bidder gets it. Advisers like John, have to help the selection process - or maybe simply say take no action for now. Hope for CDMA price drops soon. GSM is quite competitive already being further along the "supply curve", not to mention the "learning curve", so there is less scope for GSM prices to drop.
Meanwhile, Ericsson have put their full backing behind CDMA in one of the two largest scale cellular systems - Globalstar. Mobile cellsites AND handsets. Ericsson bought all of Orbitel, so are expecting to sell a lot of CDMA handsets. If they thought it wouldn't work, I can't see they'd put money in. So that leaves just Bill out of all the world who thinks that CDMA won't work. And he doesn't strictly tell the truth, so now it just a matter of how quickly the money is going to roll into Qualcomm and pals.
Will it be fast enough to justify the mega billions being poured in or is the whole wireless industry turning into an overcapacity airline equivalent, heading for a decade of losses and shareholder pain? When the price war starts, CDMA should be able to cut prices further than any other operator because of lower costs any way it is measured.
Handset prices should end up about the same. Well, even there, CDMA should be able to do better if battery life claims are valid. Bill points out that CDMA does not currently have an advantage over the best of other systems in handset battery life. But I have to take that claim with a grain of salt given the misrepresentation he has made in other areas, not to mention being plain wrong about whether CDMA would actually work at all.
Maurice |
