CDMA2000 offers operators a clear advantage; Nokia still doing well in CDMA
By 2010 there will be around a billion 3G subscribers globally, pretty much equally split between operators offering services on the WCMDA or CDMA2000 progression paths, Perry LaForge, chair and executive director of the CDMA Development Group (CDG) has told Mobile Europe.
Currently, CDMA2000 operators have about 300 million 3G subscribers under management, LaForge reckoned, representing somewhere around 75% of the total market. By 2010 though, with WCMDA operators playing catch up, and with the boost to usage from HSDPA and HSUPA, LaForge thinks the UMTS operators will have boosted their figure to 500 million, putting them on roughly equal footing with the CDMA operators.
“We’ve got be careful with those numbers though,” he said, counseling caution.
Numbers that he is less cautious about though is the head start that CDMA2000 operators have had over their WCDMA counterparts in 3G.
“I think that those guys [the CDMA2000 operators] are blowing every one away. The CDMA operators are best in class. KDDI and SK, their data [service revenues] as a percentage of ARPU is 28%, and KDDI is gaining subs from NTTDoCoMo which has just announced negative adds [net subscriber additions].
“In North America you’re seeing data higher as a percentage of ARPU. And as they move to RevA, with the ability to improve the uplink and increase revenues from user generated content and social interactivity, those numbers are going to grow, and they’ve double and tripled in the last year.”
LaForge contrasted this situation with that of the UMTS operators, who had to move customers from frequencies and handsets that worked well to less efficient frequencies, with clunkier, more expensive handsets, and sell that as a benefit, without having many additional services to do so.
“What’s it [the move to WCDMA] cost them? It’s cost them a lot. You remember when they told us they would have 3G commercially available by 2001. Well it only really started to happen in 2005. You could argue it cost them five years.”
But it’s not all bad for the seven hundred or so GSM and UMTS operators out there. LaForge thinks that HSDPA irons out many of the problems, and he concedes that the services are now on a roughly equal footing in terms of service capability.
But with CDMA 2000 1x EV-DO RevC, which the CDG has helpfully renamed Ultra Mobile Broadband, promised for commercial release in 2009, offering label speeds of 280Mbps, LaForge contrasted that favourably with the LTE plan for WCDMA operators.
He also said that the apparent defection of Nokia from CDMA, with its dissolving of its handset JV with Sanyo may not be all it seems.
“I met with the Nokia guys and they are saying that they are getting the best numbers for CDMA phones, through Verizon, that they’ve ever had. I don’t know if it’s the decision to go with an ODM strategy that’s made them a bit more nimble, or what it is, but I think that’s really interesting,” LaForge said.
Elsewhere the CDG continues to push a technology neutral policy to the world’s regulators. In India, GSM operators are asking for more frequency than CDMA operators because their technology doesn’t work as well, LaForge said. “That’s not fair.”