Telstra kills off CDMA, completes migration to GSM

by Chris Ziegler posted Apr 30th 2008 at 12:52PM

Oh, come on, Qualcomm, show a little emotion; shed a tear or something! After some two years of planning and urging legacy customers to migrate, Australia's Telstra has flipped a big, red, scary-looking switch somewhere, sending its CDMA network into darkness, never to return. The move effectively obsoletes roughly 3,500 CDMA sites around the country along with what the carrier bills as "redundant equipment" -- a nice little cost savings, no doubt, not to mention the freeing of significant chunks of spectrum for more advanced services. As you might have guessed, Telstra is jumping through these hoops to get customers onto its Next G-branded UMTS network, mirroring a widespread trend away from CDMA-based technologies and toward the GSM roadmap. Globally, it seems like CDMA2000 has years of life left -- but without a shred of major carrier support for the 4G path, its glory days may be numbered.

[Via Pocket PC Thoughts]

Filed under: Telstra, GSM, UMTS, CDMA

Tags: 3g, australia, cdma, cdma2000, gsm, nextg, telstra, umts, wcdma

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

Heathen @ Apr 30th 2008 1:54PM

Ha Ha suck it Qualcomm, the world wants a SIM card!
Now come on Canadian providers do the same thing - you know its right!

Neutral

Victor @ Apr 30th 2008 6:06PM

You messed up with punctuation. you must've meant "Haha! Suck it!": Qualcomm.

You know, for a similar sized ecosystem (network size and subcribers), qualcomm makes more off of a UMTS/W-CDMA network in chipsets/licenses/patents than it does on its own standard now?

So, being qualcomm; some sucker adopts your technology paying you...then ditches it for another technology a couple years thereafter; but paying you more still! Qualcomm even owns Edge and GSM technology patents.

Neutral

Fernando @ Apr 30th 2008 3:59PM

Qualcomm doesn't have emotions.

Neutral

dcny @ Apr 30th 2008 7:08PM

Couldnt they have leased it or resold it to some company to make a little money on the side instead of turning it off completely like what Verizon does with GSM towers it owns

Neutral

youngcalihottie @ Apr 30th 2008 9:12PM

carriers usually dont just "turn it off". like its not gonna be just sitting there. carriers usually use them for roaming agreements, sell them, or convert them to other tech.

Neutral

Pippo_San @ Apr 30th 2008 7:09PM

Qualcomm is the fuc**ng Big Brother.

Neutral

Craig @ May 1st 2008 1:13AM

youngcalihottie, turning it off is exactly what they have done. anybody that still had an active service as of the 28th April found that at midnight that handsets could not even get a dial tone. So there is no roaming and no plan to sell this system.

Neutral

Rand @ May 4th 2008 1:26AM

This is what the 'tards at Verizon and Sprint should have done years ago instead of conspiring with the Qualcomm as aspiring monopolists to set back U.S. wireless behind most of the developed world and some of the developing world! Instead Verizon talks about their fantastic network. It's the network alright...so long as you never take trips to Europe or don't mind carrying one of their bastardized selection of 3 phones that can roam globally, don't mind getting phones like the Blackberry Curve a year later than everyone else, or are too stupid to know you're being patronized when they discuss their open network philosophy which among other things means that you still can't easily switch off phones by simply popping out a SIM and must instead go through their loopy network authentication process. CDMA and Verizon---poster-childs of why the US can't stay globally competitive. Apparently, Sprint has decided they made such a good choice last time that they might as well go for another orphan technology so they can be at a competitive disadvantage for the next 20 years. Incompetence on epic scales!

Neutral

Phil @ May 3rd 2008 2:30AM

I am totally neutral between CDMA & GSM initally but during a summer parade where there were over $350,000 people in a very small area, 3 CDMA users nearby asked me to lend my GSM phone so they could make a quick call. I asked them why. They told me that they either had very low volume, no connection or call being dropped after a few seconds. My GSM phone was slightly static but the connections were made in all 3 instances. I later learned that it's CDMA's characteristic not able to handle high volume of calls. If you do get a connection, the volume became very low because of the nature of "spread spectrum" technology which Qualcomm(the inventor of CDMA) uses.

I have given meanings to the 2 competing technology:

CDMA - Calls drop in multiple areas

GSM - GOOD, SIMPLE MOBILE

Besides, most CDMA phones are made cheap and they are expensive due to low production(less demand world wide, no economies of scale).
GSM users have more selection, more choice: world-wide roaming, style, colour and functionality. Can you take your CDMA phone to Spain or France? I can honestly say Apple will not likely to make iPhones in CDMA version.

CDMA is on life support and nobody is rescuing them !

Neutral

Phil @ May 3rd 2008 2:48AM

Not only Telstra had a total shut down of its CDMA system 3 days ago, the strongest CDMA backers including South Korea's Samsung, LG and local phone companies are gradually shifting toward UMTS. Qualcomm has been arrogant in its business practice and lack cooperation with its technology partners. They are being punished. Verizon will switch to LTE in 2009. That will take about 56 millions subscribers away from CDMA. Telus & Bell Mobility in Canada will be upgrading to non-CDMA system and most other countries will go with GSM for their upgrade. CDMA may very well be a continental U.S. local technology.

Neutral

Susan Wing @ Jun 1st 2008 4:05AM

US Verizon, US Alltel, Japan's KDDI, Telecom New Zealand and Korea's KT Freetel and SK Telecom

are also in varying stages of closing their CDMA networks and switching to GSM.

Three of the above are already running their HSPA networks side-by-side. The other three are trialling LTE.

Qualcomm's preferred 4G is LTE not UWB. They own patents for both and have more to gain from rapid adoption of LTE.

UWB is only a reasonable competitor to WiMax. LTE trounces WiMax in speed, global adoption and announced carrier rollouts. It also has a strong roadmap to multi-gigabit speeds with LTE-Advanced.