October 23, 2000

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The Battle For Cellular Supremacy

By Peter Rysavy

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he worldwide cellular industry is preparing for the battle of the decade, waged between the IS-95/CDMA 2000 and the GSM/W-CDMA standards. Is one technology inherently better? Working from a clean slate, the technologies offer similar capabilities. At various times in projected deployments, one may have an advantage over the other, but things always change down the road.

For example, Global System for Mobile Communications service providers will deploy General Packet Radio Service. But code-division multiple access carriers will soon have CDMA2000 1X. GSM carriers can then offer enhanced data rates for global evolution, but then CDMA carriers will have 1XEV. And so on.

The advantages to network operators lie elsewhere. First, there are infrastructure considerations. W-CDMA builds on GSM core-network protocols, so GSM service providers will find it easier to migrate to W-CDMA than to CDMA2000. The converse holds true for IS-95 service providers, which will find it easier to migrate to CDMA2000. Another major consideration is intellectual-property rights. Qualcomm, which owns many CDMA patents, has a stronger intellectual-property position with CDMA2000 than with W-CDMA. In fact, the European cellular industry invented W-CDMA partly to work around Qualcomm's patents. Qualcomm still has patents that pertain to W-CDMA, but not as many.

The United States will likely see both technologies deployed, but the rest of the world is leaning toward the use of W-CDMA. The potential domination of W-CDMA could well sway operators with IS-95 systems in countries such as Korea and Japan to accept W-CDMA rather than risk systems that aren't compatible with cellular systems in neighboring countries.

For customers, which technology prevails may not be a factor. Both will offer high-speed wireless IP networking, and customers will be able to port applications from one network to the other. And multimode devices in the future may even make it possible to roam between these networks. In the meantime, this will be a grand spectacle to observe.

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