CDMA roams forward

The international roaming capabilities of GSM have been well-publicized. But there’s a perception that CDMA doesn’t have the same capabilities, said John Martin, a KDDI Mobile Business Center director (www.kddi.com).

“CDMA roams as well as GSM does,” Martin said. During a recent telephone interview, Martin commented on the most recent launch of Global Passport, KDDI’s and its au Group subsidiary’s cdmaOne international roaming service.

Last week, Telecom Mobile ( http://www.telecom.co.nz) in New Zealand launched the service, which currently only supports Japanese subscribers traveling into New Zealand. With this launch, the Global Passport service is available in six countries. The service is also being offering in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, South Korea and the United States.

One significant aspect of the New Zealand launch is that Telecom Mobile introduced cdmaOne services on July 9.

“We roamed with them four weeks later instead of four years later,” Martin said. “Almost instant launching of domestic service and roaming service is a very positive story and something that hopefully you’ll see more of in the CDMA community.”

Martin said KDDI expects to expand into more countries before the end of this year, though he declined to say when or where.

New service options also are appearing. For instance, KDDI now offers access to an e-mail service known as EZweb@mail, as well as international roaming. In mid-July, the company introduced a new cdmaOne handset, Sanyo Electric’s (www.sanyousa.com) C412SA, which supports both functions.

KDDI doesn’t have firm plans for roaming on next-generation CDMA networks, according to Martin. “As with the other technologies, you’ll see a continuing evolution of roaming into the higher bandwidth and packet data services in coming years,” he said. “We’re certainly working on that, but at this time, we have no specific announcements to make.”

However, Martin confirmed that there's an international community of CDMA players committed to expanding CDMA roaming. Illustrative of this are the international roaming memorandums of understanding signed between China Unicom and 13 other CDMA carriers in June, he said. The participants included: Bell Mobility (www.mobility.com), Verizon International (www.verizon.com/international/) on behalf of IUSACELL (www.iusacell.com.mx/stock.htm), Sprint PCS (www.sprintpcs.com), Telstra (www.telstra.com) and KDDI.