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To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (654)	8/7/1999 4:26:00 PM
From: kech	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

Art -I'm in my office so I looked up some more info on the dates and relative "availability" of TDMA and CDMA. I have a business case of McCaw in 1990 trying to decide which technology to use. At that time, TDMA was approved in 1989 and McCaw was expecting TDMA to be available by 1991. In January 1991, LA Cellular Telephone, a joint venture of 60% owned by Bell South and 40% owned by LIN Broadasing plased the first order for TDMA infrastructure. In May 1991, Southwestern Bell and McCaw Cellular anounced a JV to establish Cellular One as a standardized brand in cellular phone service. The Southwestern Bell president said at this time that TDMA was at final lockdown while CDMA was "unproven" and claimed that CDMA threatened to slow the industries move to digital. In Dec 1991, Southwestern Bell announced it would deploy TDMA in 1992 in Chicago, Dallas, Washington, Baltimore and Boston. In August 1993, ATT bought McCaw for $12.6 billion in an all stock transaction. Contrast this timing to PrimeCo finally turning on CDMA systems in November 1996. Those were long years from 93-96 with a lot of white knuckles as the press would announce market share gains for the TDMA crowd.

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (654)	8/7/1999 5:41:00 PM
From: engineer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

It is funny ow this thread goes on about some stuff.... It was AT&T who sponsored the first CDMA development. True, they did want to get on with the TDMA stuff, but the AT&T camp was divided by the McCaw group who wanted TDMA and the Bell Labs guys who wanted CDMA. Eventually, Bell Labs was split out as Lucent as the Craig McCaw group got their way. TDMA was not even out there in the field when CDMA was tested as of 1991. If any of you had been at the DEc 7, 1991 CTIA meetings you would have witnessed the total shock on the TDMA camps face when Dr. Jacobs annouced that CDMA had been sucessfully demonstrated in a large scale field trial and was "the only fully tested digital standard out there at the time". What happened after that was the TDMA camp decided to hold a giant meeting in January, spent something like $10M on a push to squash CDMA, lobbied the CTIA to make damm sure that Qualcomm had to get their CDMA stuff approved as a standard before any equipment was delivered, so this set CDMA back 18 months beofre the carriers were ready to adopt the CDMA for use. In the early phases of TDMA, they rushed it out the door so that they could "get out there first", and in doing so sealed the fate of TDMA such that it failed in all markets except AT&T. the phones and the burst equalizer did not work, they could not get over 2 times analog cpapcity, and the voice quality was terrible. but they got there first and they got CDMA delayed. I doubt that you will much of this in any magazine articles of the times...

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (654)	8/8/1999 12:41:00 AM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

Art, << how many TDMA subscribers there were around 1996 >> In it's 1998 Forecast Cahners In-Stat gave these subscriber figures for 96/97 (US Only). Total Subscribers End 1996 TDMA 800 - 1,249,000 TDMA 1900 - 0 CDMA 800 - 57,000 CDMA 1900 - 68,000 GSM 1900 - 927,000 Total Subscribers End 1997 TDMA 800 - 2,194,000 TDMA 1900 - 727,000 CDMA 800 - 1,327,000 CDMA 1900 - 1,620,000 GSM 1900 - 1,134,000 If I recall the 1998 forecast was based on actual subscriber figures through end Q2 1997 so the 1997 numbers are in fact forecasted year ending figures. The 1997 GSM numbers look a bit low. I think GSM Alliance reported 1,500,000 year ending 1997. These are US totals only. There are some good slides of more recent subscriber data excerpted from a presentation given by Julian Herbert of EMC World Cellular Database at the GSM North America Conference in Boston in November 1998 located at: - World - gsmdata.com - North America - pcsdata.com - Eric -