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]

While Nokia and Qualcomm continue various spats and other legal nonsense to the nth degree, the future of 3G may be at risk. Well, not really -- but Nokia says it could very well slow things down, and mobile WiMAX and other technology that Qualcomm can't claim exclusive license to may be a possible answer. Qualcomm may be in for a bit of shock as the world's transition to 3G technology will mean more and more reluctance to pay any entity royalties. One thing seems clear here -- these two companies don't seem eager to settle on anything these days.

[Via mocoNews.net]

While most folks are just getting over the Rev A novelty, it looks like Qualcomm is already prepared to take things to the next level, as it has developed a new chipset that reportedly delivers "9.3Mbps data transfers in field testing." The MSM7850 is being touted as the "industry's first device solution for EV-DO Rev B," hopefully enabling more of those mobile streaming niceties that we all adore. Additionally, Qualcomm stated that there wouldn't be a need for "infrastructure hardware changes" in order to take advantage of the Rev B sweetness, and the chipset itself would be "fully backwards compatible." As for the firm's CSM6800, a "software solution" will purportedly be available by the month's end which will enable "multi-carrier EV-DO Rev B support." Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of detail surrounding hard dates beyond that, but we can expect the outfit's Rev B-capable MSM7850 to hit testing / sampling later this year, after which the countdown to EV-DO Rev C can officially begin.

Anyone else notice that most of the fanfare surrounding the concept of the almost-free unsubsidized handset has been largely restricted to the GSM camp? Sure, we have occasional CDMA examples like Kyocera's K122 and K132 -- but with all due respect to Kyocera, cooler looking GSM goodies like the MOTOFONE have been generating just a bit more buzz. No worries, though; a handful of scrappy Korean startups are looking to correct the imbalance, committing to deliver $30 handsets utilizing CDMA2000 1x radios (no EV-DO, we're guessing) to India starting in December of this year with other Southeast Asian countries hopping on the bandwagon in '07. According to Rose Telecom, one of the startups involved in the initiative, the phones should take another dive to the $20 mark in 2008. We can almost sense American prepaid MVNOs expressing interest already.

Update: A resourceful reader has pointed out that Motorola's also offering a CDMA variant of the MOTOFONE, which clearly raises the bar for style in the CDMA emerging markets segment. The Korean folks still look to have a slight edge on pricing here -- but with Motorola having suggested that we'll be seeing $15 handsets by '08, they may not for long. [Thanks, Rich]