Global Majors moving away from GSM

Hindustan Times
By Siddharth Zarabi
June 6, 2005

Qualcomm CEO-elect Paul Jacobs believes that Indian GSM operators will move to third-generation mobile services using wideband CDMA (WCDMA) technology as the market matures to demand better data rates and applications.

Speaking to visiting Indian journalists at Qualcomm headquarters here, Jacobs, who will take over the reins of the CDMA technology pioneer on July 1, says this breakout will be triggered by the launch of highspeed evolution data optimised (EVDO) services by Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices. "CDMA networks in India will launch EV-DO, whose data rates are difficult for GSM to match. So the GSM operators will press for being given 3G licences at the earliest. The only question that needs to be resolved is the charge for the spectrum," he added.

EV-DO is a wireless radio broadband data protocol being adopted by many CDMA mobile phone providers in Japan, Korea, the US and Canada. In comparison to the CDMA 1X networks being used by these carriers currently or the GPRS and EDGE technology being used by GSM operators, EV-DO is significantly faster, allowing average download speeds of 300-500 kbps.

"Big operators have stopped investments in GSM and will move to WCDMA," Jacobs said. He predicts that a breakout will happen this Christmas with a big push on WCDMA networks. "Handset prices will also come down to a reasonable lev el," he added.