Conan Kudo

There was information distributed to investors at the Capital Markets Day for Deutsche Telekom in December. Essentially, T-Mobile is steadily investing in network upgrades and expansions through 2015. However, these numbers are conservative, and likely have been raised already.

Even Virgin and Boost phones? Are you telling me that Sprint couldn't allow those?

That is currently true. However, a Sprint WCDMA network would have a number of current restrictions removed from it. One major restriction is that Sprint-branded phones are the only phones allowed. No Virgin Mobile phones, no Boost Mobile phones, no non-Sprint (but compatible) CDMA phones, and no compatible CDMA/LTE phones. That goes away with Sprint PCS WCDMA. The sheer size of the PCS WCDMA ecosystem is monumental. Because of early influence by deployments in the Americas, Europe and Asia are saturated with tri-band WCDMA phones that do WCDMA 900/1900/2100. There's also Latin America, who has largely converted PCS CDMA2000 to WCDMA, or at least done the overlay and stopped selling CDMA phones. Canada has done something similar, in order to get roaming revenue for the Olympics and simplify the LTE deployment architecture. There's also inbound roaming. Right now, AT&T has a monopoly on PCS WCDMA roaming. And AT&T's rates are ridiculous. It was the same in Canada (with Rogers) until the Bell+Telus WCDMA network came online. Roaming rates have come down there.

It wouldn't actually require replacing large numbers of phones, since the only phone released in recent years that doesn't support UMTS and doesn't support ESMR CDMA is the iPhone 4. That phone will get phased out anyway, as they upgrade to newer models. Not to mention, stringing three Ev-DO Rev B carriers together is less efficient than a single UMTS 1900 carrier that offers Category 14 (21.1Mbps) downlink and category 7 (11.1Mbps) uplink and one (short-term) Ev-DO Rev A carrier for backward compatibility.

I actually agree with him, too. Back in the 90s, I was in the CDMA camp (which A.J. may not believe). The cdmaOne and CDMA2000 systems were by far technically superior to the GSM camp. No one likes Ericsson front-line people that much. They're like Cisco in that sense. However, I think that the 3GPP has caught up and surpassed them now. And yes, I'm also aware of the dark dealings behind the cover that led to the GSM domination. And apparently, his vicious wishes have come true about the EU, too.

Quite a few do. Off the top of my head, I believe India, Afghanistan, Iraq, and most of Africa's mobile users post tweets through SMS. Interestingly enough, Twitter counts multi-byte characters as a single character, which can cause issues for CJK and Indic languages being written through SMS on Twitter (since SMS counts multi-byte characters as a set of multiple single-byte characters).

This is hard. I cringe every time I have to make a choice on how to butcher English to make it all fit...

Well, that's not really as much of an issue anymore. Sprint has all that ESMR for CDMA 1X-Advanced and LTE. ESMR, PCS A-F, PCS G, and soon PCS H will give Sprint plenty of room. This is pretty much the case for everyone. T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless have largely had simpler M&A based expansions. AT&T's has been a mess over the years, with a multitude of acquisitions across a wide range of technologies and frequencies. AT&T's network is such a mess internally that its own engineers dislike dealing with some of the internal bridging done to make everything work. That's why its quality is lower than others, even other GSM/UMTS operators across the globe. AT&T is massively due for a network rebuild, but ironically it can't afford that. The CapEx for AT&T to rebuild its entire network would be ridiculous.

GSM was also actually developed slightly before Qualcomm's cdmaOne was. The EU decided to unify on the GSM system for digital because of the massive mess of analog systems deployed throughout Europe. As for 3G onward, UMTS uses W-CDMA, which incorporates quite a bit of Qualcomm's IP. However, unlike the cdmaOne and CDMA2000 systems, Qualcomm was forced to sign FRAND agreements to have the technology incorporated. That's why the ecosystem is more "democratic" with more players and more interesting work going on. CDMA is more expensive because there are fewer players in the market for key inputs. For basebands, there is only Qualcomm and (ugh) VIA Telecom. For many years, only Alcatel-Lucent, ZTE, Huawei, and Nortel Networks offered infrastructure equipment. For the US and European markets, Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel flourished, while ZTE and Huawei mainly developed for Asian markets. Since Europe and Asia used technology-specific licensing, most countries were barred from using CDMA systems on standard frequencies. Europe primarily uses CDMA on 450MHz for Wireless Local Loop or rural broadband services after NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephone, one of many analog cellular systems developed for Europe) systems were decommissioned. The equipment is not cheap because there are very few that make equipment on that band. CDMA on 850MHz (3GPP2 BC0, to be clear) did spread quite a bit throughout the Americas, China, India, Japan and Korea (J-CDMA, later OMA CDMA), and Oceania. However, the economic scale of CDMA2000 was crushed over time as UMTS networks grew in number from 2004 to 2009. Latin America decided to migrate in full force a couple of years ago, and one of the last large networks was just shut off this year. Oceania did the same, and now the major CDMA networks actively sold and utilized are Europe 450MHz networks (which will upgrade to LTE in three years), and US networks.

It wasn't a T-Mobile branded data card. It was a white label data card (no branding on it, but curiously pentaband, nevertheless) that a friend of mine brought from Eastern Europe to try. I don't have it anymore because he went back for the month.

This. LTE TDD was simply not ready by the time that Sprint was required to have service up on BRS+EBS. WiMAX was a suitable TDD 3G system to brand as 4G for Sprint's purposes. Technically, the T-Mobile HSPA+42 network is Category 24 DL and Category 7 UL. The HSPA+21 network is is Category 14 DL and Category 7 UL. The Category 7 UL means theoretical uplink data rates of 11Mbps. While most phones currently only support Category 6 UL, Category 7 UL is coming soon to most phones. I've used a data card that supported Cat 24 / Cat 7 on T-Mobile's network. The transfer rates are roughly equivalent of what I normally experience on LTE (I'm in 5MHz FDD LTE market) and the latencies are slightly better on average (excepting this last week where things have gone kind of weird).