Quote:
Originally Posted by
John.B 
All things being equal, CDMA may or may not be a superior technology for voice calls but HSDPA is a far superior technology to EV-DO for cellular data.
That may be true if you've got coverage, but AT&T sure seems to have trouble deploying HSDPA compared to the EV-DO providers. This could just be due to AT&T being lazy/incompetent, but I suspect the real problem is the huge amount of spectrum that UMTS/HSDPA requires. That's gotta make logistics difficult in a lot of places.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DHKOsta 
Actually, that's completely untrue. By any measure, GSM is superior to CDMA as a standard.* GSM is less widely deployed (that means fewer towers) in North America due to its youth here, and that's why you're inclined to call it a lesser "technology." Your statement is the logical equivalent of "Driving is a superior means of travel to flying because the airport is further from my house than my garage."
Now this
really isn't true. CDMA is technically superior to GSM. It doesn't have GSM's 35 km range limitation, and it supports soft handoffs. There's a reason that some of the CDMA carriers manage to cover rural areas well and the GSM carriers never do. CDMA phones also work better in low-signal conditions, and don't drop calls as often. CDMA also supports more users per cell site and has no hard limits on the number of people that can connect to a tower at once. It also doesn't have that irritating tendency to make consumer electronics with speakers in them go "zzt, zzt, zzt" all the time if the phone happens to be in the same room. GSM may be more popular, but it
is inferior technologically. It's not the difference between VHS and Betamax. It's the difference between VHS and DVD.
There's a reason that UMTS/HSDPA is based on CDMA, rather than the TDMA that GSM uses. In an ideal world, no one would be using GSM anymore, and they'd all be migrated over to UMTS, but sadly it looks like it probably won't be completely phased out until after LTE hits.