Bell, Telus to announce HSPA partnership this week?
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Sep 1st 2008 1:01PM
posted Sep 1st 2008 1:01PM
Now that literally everyone on the planet except Bell and Telus themselves has accepted that the Canadian carriers are moving away from CDMA, the rumors are really starting to heat up -- and there's a twist this time around. Rather than wait for LTE, the Financial Post is reporting that Canada's two CDMA giants will proceed directly to HSPA posthaste, dropping $1 billion in the process to try to get a network up and running in just one year's time. Furthermore, they won't be trying to outbuild one another; instead, FP's sources report that Bell and Telus will be partnering in an effort to take the Rogers juggernaut head-on. It's starting to look more and more like CDMA is becoming a burden and a competitive disadvantage for the carriers that are still on it -- and if this all goes down, Rogers had better be looking over its shoulder.[Thanks, Justin S.]
wow I can't wait for this to be true, rogers has had their monopoly on gsm for long enough now.
Hopefully they will be announcing the switch this week otherwise we are just running in circles here, because either way it is going to be announced by both sometime in the future.
Bell and Telus still remain CDMA on 2G part, but they'll use AWS for both UMTS and LTE
AWS? That stupid band that no other region is using? COME ON, can't ONE North American carrier use a standard 3G frequency? Please?
I agree hopefully something is annouced soon, it seems like there is something new
poping up every few weeks about this. Heres hoping TELUS will kill the rumors soon
and make it official.
Yet again, comments that CDMA are a burden. Does anyone actually bother to mention that HSPA is based on CDMA (or in this case, the WCDMA variant)? In that respect, Bell and telus are probably better equipped to convert to HSPA in short order than most legacy GSM carriers were, since their RF engineers already understand many of the finer points of CDMA networks.
You're talking about two entirely different standards and things.
The article was talking about CDMA the mobile phone standard being a burden. It is.
HSPA (actually UMTS) is not based upon CDMA-the-mobile-phone-standard (IS-95/IS-2000). UMTS is a revision of GSM.
The only thing UMTS and IS-95/IS-2000 have in common is that they both use Code Division Multiple Access technology for the air interface. They don't even use this in the same way, using different encodings, frame rates, even spectrum slice widths. To use a car analogy, claiming they have much in common is like claiming a motorbike and a dump truck are both variants of the same thing because they both have tires made of rubber.
Bell and Telus will not find UMTS a drop-in replacement for IS-95/IS-2000. The two systems are entirely different, employing entirely different models of how a phone system should work. Essentially the entire infrastructure - with the exception of the base stations themselves - will need to be built from scratch.
I don't know why people keep banging on with this meme that UMTS has more in common with IS-95/IS-2000. They have almost nothing in common. I assume it has to do with the bizarre war Qualcomm was running against GSM in the late nineties where they managed to convince people that the crummy, half-witted, AMPS-derived "standard" they were pushing was better than GSM (a) because of the air interface and (b) because it didn't come from anything connected to a government (GSM was the product of European phone companies, which in the 1980s were publicly owned.) Their FUD campaign and insistence that one, relatively minor, component of a standard was the only thing that mattered, actually did a lot to prevent progress in the mobile phone sphere. We're now finally moving to LTE, which is what UMTS would have looked like had CDMA not been politicized.