Telecom Operators re-evaluating their CDMA startegies

Telstra recently confirmed its plans to shut down its CDMA network in Australia, in favor of its new Next G W-CDMA based network. This is bad news for Telecom NZ customers as they will no longer be able to roam to Australia. (Unless they acquire dual mode CDMA/W-CDMA phones!)

This may not be the only bad news for Telecom however. It appears that Telstra is not alone in re-thinking its CDMA strategy. According to GigaOM, “CDMA is losing friends faster than me losing my pounds”. Some examples of this:

# Three carriers in China (Unicom), India (Reliance), and Brazil (Vivo) are re-evaluating their CDMA strategies
# Sprint announced last year that it will deploy mobile WiMAX as its 4G network instead of evolving its 3G CDMA network
# Europe has, and always will be exclusively GSM/W-CDMA based.

Read More..