Beyond the Holy War

Much of the wireless industry breathed a huge sigh of relief in the late 1990s when rival technology camps finally decided to put an end to their mudslinging. Air interface bashing had reached epic proportions, dominating much of the industry's dialog and turning formerly cordial competitors into rhetorical enemies. Things got so intense that people started referring to it as a technological “holy war.”

At a certain point, however, the backers of the various formats apparently decided to accept the fact that all the digital air interfaces used in U.S. networks — CDMA, TDMA and GSM — worked, even if they had their various strengths and weaknesses. (Either that, or they realized that developing their formats of choice was smarter than disparaging others'.) In time, even hard-line vendor proponents of CDMA started sheepishly expanding their businesses into the GSM realm, while die-hard GSM backers were tinkering around with various forms of CDMA.

The point wasn't that it no longer mattered what digital air interfaces wireless service providers had selected, or which formats were the most logical for technology vendors to develop. It was that choices and investments had been made, and it was time to turn those technologies into marketable services.

The decision to leave technology rhetoric behind was a good one. Although the mobile industry didn't exactly live up to the early hype about how quickly the wireless data revolution would take hold, most wireless service providers are now enjoying varying degrees of success with data offerings. Success, as it turned out, was tied not only to decisions made early on, but also to migration paths chosen further down the road — and, importantly, to the intelligence and efficiency with which network evolution strategies were pursued.

For AT&T Wireless Services, the subject of this month's cover story, those later choices about technology migration were especially critical. AT&T Wireless not only had to pick a strategy for its analog-to-digital transition, it also had to make an even tougher choice to change that strategy when it became evident that TDMA didn't offer the best path to 3G. As Dan O'Shea covers in his profile of the carrier, it was in large part the experience and vision of some of the company's long-time executives that helped AT&T Wireless pull off that difficult maneuver.

Technology selection and deployment certainly has not become any less complex for wireless carriers, especially considering the 802.everything formats that are becoming increasingly important to wireless network evolution. But as the experience of AT&T Wireless demonstrates, smart execution, cost considerations and, perhaps most critical, flexibility, are at least as important — if not more.