With the development of UMB halted at the moment, many questions are floating around about the impact this might have on the future of CDMA. Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDMA Development Group (CDG), talks about the future of CDMA2000 and how operators stand to benefit from enhancements to their current 3G core investments.
What will it mean for CDMA when the development of UMB ends, and how will the other emerging 3.5-4G technologies impact the existing 3G technologies?
As with other 3G technologies, CDMA2000 will continue to grow and be complemented by emerging technologies, such as LTE and Mobile WiMAX, as they are launched in densely-populated urban markets to provide additional broadband capacity, or as a supplement to where the demand for data services is high.
3G CDMA (eg, CDMA2000/EV-DO and WCDMA/HSPA) will remain the core revenue-generating technology for most operators throughout the next decade, even when wider-bandwidth OFDM-based technologies are commercialized and begin to interoperate with 3G services. It is projected that in 2009, one out of every two handsets sold worldwide will be 3G CDMA-enabled.
Since the path to interoperability with LTE and Mobile WiMAX is the same, operators will continue to generate revenue using their preferred 3G technology while they are building their wide-bandwidth networks. Furthermore, CDMA2000 will continue to be developed and enhanced.
China Telecom has been granted a license to provide services in China. So why will CDMA2000 operators such as China Telecom be among the first to take these steps? What role will 3G CDMA take when wider-bandwidth OFDM-based solutions such as LTE and Mobile WiMAX are deployed?
China Telecom has announced aggressive plans for CDMA2000 services in China to be the first to deploy 3G mobile broadband services in China using EV-DO Rev A technology. This first-to-market advantage is possible because CDMA2000 is a proven technology that has been commercialized by more than 275 operators worldwide over the past eight years. Today, there are more than 463 million CDMA2000 subscribers accessing a large selection of services.
China Telecom intends to leverage its large existing user base of wireline customers by bundling mobile or fixed wireless CDMA2000 telephony, Internet access and other value-added data services within their monthly subscriptions. China Telecom also intends to upgrade its PAS subscribers to CDMA2000. CDMA operators have some of the most successful 3G data models in the industry today, providing valuable examples for China Telecom.
Looking ahead, China Telecom (as with other CDMA2000 operators) will continue to build-out and enhance its CDMA2000 network and then augment those core assets with LTE as needed. These technologies will be complementary to each other and meet different, specific needs.
What will be the future of CDMA2000, and how will operators stand to benefit from enhancements to their current 3G core investments?
CDMA2000 is growing worldwide, and will continue to grow as "the 3G technology of choice" in emerging markets such as Africa, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. CDMA2000 will continue to be enhanced to enable greater voice capacity (by a factor of four) and faster data speeds (up to 40Mbps) with many of these enhancements requiring minimal upgrades to current hardware investments. These enhancements will improve the user experience and the economics of delivering voice and broadband data services.
Source:techon