Debates kick up half a G

The first 3G networks have only just appeared in the U.S., and even though most carriers haven't worked out their 3G rollout plans and the industry is still more than a year away from anything close to nationwide coverage, carriers have started firing off the first shots in the next battle over network technology.

The chest-thumping began in May, when Cingular Wireless announced its first field trials of a UMTS and high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) network. Cingular President and CEO Stan Sigman was quick to point out that its wideband CDMA migration path was actually a voice and data solution that would “trump” the data-only CDMA 1X EV-DO technology adopted by Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless. Two months later, AT&T Wireless' chief technology officer Rod Nelson began defending UMTS's relatively slower data rates when compared to EV-DO, hyping HSDPA's projected bandwidth topping out at 14 Mb/s, almost seven times faster than peak speeds of either current technology.

The CDMA carriers, not to be outdone, got in their own digs. Oliver Valente, Sprint's vice president of technology development, called Cingular's plans to deploy HSDPA “aspirational more than they are realistic” while promoting his own company's deployment of EV-DO and eventual migration to EV-DO Release A or EV-DV. And throughout its rollout of EV-DO services this year, Verizon Wireless has been quick to point out that for all of the talk about 3G and beyond-3G technologies from the GSM carriers, there are only six markets in the U.S. with UMTS networks, and not a single additional commitment to rollout more.

There are only a handful of actual 3G subscribers the U.S. today, so the carriers engaging in a little posturing over so-called 3.5G services appears harmless — akin to the initial buildup of the 3G debate five years ago. But don't expect the carriers to let up. Although technologies like HSDPA and the various release schedules of EV-DO may be a few years in the future, the U.S. might be quicker to deploy them than they were to initially deploy 3G. Unlike Western Europe — which usually follows East Asia in the technological advancement pecking order — the U.S. has a huge market, and because of its bipolar nature, carriers have to compete on technology in addition to other market factors. Issues like EV-DO's lack of voice capabilities and its cumbersome channel size will play against UMTS's requirements for entirely separate networks and slower data rates. There are a lot more factors than just the spectral efficiencies of time division versus code division that dominated debates in the past, and carriers will do their best to exploit them.