Everyone in the cellular industry including Apple knows that the CDMA standard used by Verizon and Sprint is at the end of its road. Verizon recently announced that it was going to evolve its network to the LTE standard and Sprint is moving towards the WIMAX standard. USA Today reported yesterday that Apple and Verizon have been in discussions about a CDMA based iPhone. Given the comments by the recent comments by Apple COO, Tim Cook that it was not worth producing a CDMA version of the iPhone for such a small batch of customers, I don't understand how USA Today statement about a CDMA iPhone holds water. I agree with OM Malik; I don't buy it either.
The interesting undertones in this story are that Verizon understands the power of the iPhone and how it is helping AT&T gain customers even in this economy. The good news for consumers is that AT&T has also announced it would be upgrading its network to LTE, although current plans slated for 2011, a year later than Verizon. Could the iPhone spur a network improvement war, I sure hope so. And as I mentioned earlier making the iPhone available to both AT&T and Verizon would allow the consumer to choose a carrier based on network performance. A win win situation for consumers.
Update 4/28/09: USA Today corrects the article, by adding Tim Cook's statement about CDMA. However, it still misses the point about CDMA by stating "It is possible to build phones that work on both CDMA and LTE networks." Duh, of course it is possible, how would Verizon be upgrading its network to LTE without dual mode handsets. The point is that it makes no sense for Apple to build a CDMA iPhone…
Today (8/29/2009), I was listening to a program called, "China Today". It is a news program that originates from China. One of the segments spoke of how Apple has partnered with one of the major cell phone providers in China and that the provider uses CDMA technology.
So, the question becomes, can a Chinese market CDMA iPhone be hacked so that it will work with Verizon's network?
Posted by: Butch McNurlan | August 29, 2009 at 11:49 PM
China Unicom originally had a GSM and CDMA network. In 2008 they sold their CDMA network to China Telecom. The iPhone is a GSM phone and will work on their GSM network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Unicom
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/technology/companies/29iphone.html?_r=1&ref=technology
Posted by: Stephen Skarlatos | August 31, 2009 at 07:34 AM
Just found this article searching for something unrelated.
First things first: you might find it shocking but modern cellphones use separate standards for data and for voice. GSM phones use TDMA for voice, and CDMA phones use CDMA for voice.
With data it gets somewhat tricky. You see CDMA turned out to be a pretty good standard as far as mobile bandwidth is concerned, so most currently deployed 3G standards are CDMA derived. Yes, especially on GSM carriers. EDGE was TDMA-based but it could hardly be called 3G. AT&T IPhone actually has Qualcomm derived WCDMA chip inside of it:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/87577-iphone-bounties-for-qualcomm-and-infineon
CDMA is not "at the end of it's road", on the contrary it is in it's golden age (for data, anyway). LTE standard and WiMAX don't seek to replace CDMA in any capacity (for voice or data), they are separate standards that are intended to run on top of existing technologies to enhance speeds.
Posted by: Anthony Guselnikov | November 06, 2009 at 05:07 PM