The following is an excerpt from a 1/6/97 CommunicationsWeek article entitled "Conference Message: 'It works. It is real.' -- CDMA finally has its day in the Sun" (note: the reference in the first sentence to "models" regards handsets):
Nokia said it plans to introduce several new models this year, as does Lucent Technologies Inc., Oki America Inc., Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics America Inc.
Sony Electronics Inc., one of the vendors already supplying CDMA phones, is gearing up to mass-produce them. A joint venture between Sony and Qualcomm will give the companies the capacity to make 3 million handsets annually, according to Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm's senior vice president.
Meeting needs
Industry observers noted that without the capacity to mass-produce
handsets, the projected growth in demand for CDMA will go unmet.
According to several industry executives, there are now about 1 million users on CDMA networks around the world. In South Korea, demand for CDMA is growing rapidly because the government has adopted it as a national standard. And in Hong Kong, there are about 60,000 subscribers on Hutchinson Telecommunications Ltd.'s network there.
CDMA networks in the United States and Canada are still in start-up
mode, though.
During the next three years, CDMA usage is expected to mushroom, said
John Ledahl, director of wireless programs for Dataquest Inc., a San
Jose, Calif., research company. Dataquest has predicted that the number of CDMA users will grow to almost 60 million by the year 2000. |
