squiggleslash @ Sep 3rd 2008 2:21PM

You're talking about two entirely different standards and things.

The article was talking about CDMA the mobile phone standard being a burden. It is.

HSPA (actually UMTS) is not based upon CDMA-the-mobile-phone-standard (IS-95/IS-2000). UMTS is a revision of GSM.

The only thing UMTS and IS-95/IS-2000 have in common is that they both use Code Division Multiple Access technology for the air interface. They don't even use this in the same way, using different encodings, frame rates, even spectrum slice widths. To use a car analogy, claiming they have much in common is like claiming a motorbike and a dump truck are both variants of the same thing because they both have tires made of rubber.

Bell and Telus will not find UMTS a drop-in replacement for IS-95/IS-2000. The two systems are entirely different, employing entirely different models of how a phone system should work. Essentially the entire infrastructure - with the exception of the base stations themselves - will need to be built from scratch.

I don't know why people keep banging on with this meme that UMTS has more in common with IS-95/IS-2000. They have almost nothing in common. I assume it has to do with the bizarre war Qualcomm was running against GSM in the late nineties where they managed to convince people that the crummy, half-witted, AMPS-derived "standard" they were pushing was better than GSM (a) because of the air interface and (b) because it didn't come from anything connected to a government (GSM was the product of European phone companies, which in the 1980s were publicly owned.) Their FUD campaign and insistence that one, relatively minor, component of a standard was the only thing that mattered, actually did a lot to prevent progress in the mobile phone sphere. We're now finally moving to LTE, which is what UMTS would have looked like had CDMA not been politicized.