CTIA feeling new pressure

CTIA Wireless fell victim this year not just to the recession but to the growing importance of CES and Mobile World Congress, which not only siphoned off potential attendees but a good deal of industry spectacle.

Increasingly CES is becoming the venue where vendors unveil their latest handsets and mobile operators launch new services — events once reserved for CTIA. Meanwhile, the GSM Association's MWC in Barcelona has been grabbing more of the overall limelight, becoming not just a showcase for the European wireless market but also North America's.

The industry's focus is shifting from CDMA to long-term evolution (LTE), bringing a majority of the world's major operators under a single standards umbrella. While CTIA in the past presented an operator such as Verizon Wireless with the ideal podium to tout its CDMA leadership, the company's embrace of LTE now gives it a much larger global stage. VZW took full advantage of that platform this year when it chose to announce its LTE vendors and rollout plans at MWC.

CTIA remains huge for CDMA, and the show generated plenty of news. Much of that news, however, focused on integrating LTE networks with legacy ones. Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and ZTE touted CDMA baseband gear that could be upgraded to LTE. Nokia Siemens Networks demoed CDMA-to-LTE handoff options.

Though LTE captured most of the attention this year, it would be a mistake to write off CDMA, said Rick Mostaert, director of LTE product management for Motorola. CDMA still has plenty of life left in it, and operators are still building and expanding their networks, whether they plan on deploying LTE or not, Mostaert said.

“This is the CDMA show,” Mostaert said of CTIA. “CDMA operators may be moving toward LTE, but I don't think every CDMA operator is going to move as quickly as Verizon Wireless just because Verizon's leading the way.”