Well guess what, and obviously you know this, WCDMA poses just such a risk:
From engineer post #22392:
It is planned to be exactly like the GSM overlay that CDMAOne did last year. Use the current GSM switches, network planning, but use the CDMA over the air waveform. this would mean replacing the basestations, but not the rest of the system.
In this respect, Qualcomm would also have the lead in that they have already proven this with IS-95 and the upgrade to CDMA2000 would then be just a simple set of chips in the basestation cards. Not like WCDMA, where they have an asynchronous pilot and have to figure out alot of system things like how it performs under load, how does soft handoffs really work wiht a collision detect, backoff, contention system, etc. This is largely untried and involves alot of coordination. It is yet to be seen how it works under load. Since they can't go commercial without invoking a trade restraint, then they cannot test this under fully loaded conditions (i.e. 1000's of customers during rush hour on a busy day...).
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