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Telus, Bell Announce Switch From CDMA To HSDPA

Submitted by Edward Kirk on July 24, 2008 - 7:22pm.
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Things in Canada seem to be getting better for cell phone owners, and surprisingly fast. Not long after the announcement of the formation of a new Canadian wireless carrier as a result of a recent spectrum auction, Canadian carriers Bell and Telus have both announced plans to drastically transition their entire networks from.

After the announcement that Globalive would be forming a new cellular carrier, both carriers have announced that they are converting their networks, which currently work on the same CDMA phone technology as US carriers Sprint, Verizon, and numerous others, to the HSDPA technology used by Rogers Wireless, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in Canada.

Supposedly the decision was triggered by concerns from one either company that Rogers' GSM technology was giving it a competitive advantage by being more compatible with the majority of handsets around the world.

Gee, you think? Sure, you realize this 'after' Rogers gets the iPhone.

Actually, that might not be far from accurate. It is suspected (by people other than myself) that one of the primary turning points for Bell and Telus to switch to GSM was to be one day compatible with the iPhone 3G. They've both begun offering the same iPhone competitors on their networks as the CDMA networks in the US.

The switches will undoubtedly be quite expensive, probably around $360 to $480 million.

[via CBC]

advantage my foot!

Submitted by Canadianiphoner! (not verified) on July 24, 2008 - 8:38pm.
Telus and bell both don't care at all that rogers is the only gsm in town. They just want a piece of the big pie which will be the olympics in 2010. Think of all the unlocked gsm phones coming from all over the world, that would only be able to go on rogers. You really think they would give up all that?

Title correction

Submitted by imagine engine on July 25, 2008 - 6:43am.
I believe the title should read "Telus and Bell announce switch from CDMA to GSM" not "Telus, Bell announce switch from CDMA to HSDPA". HSDPA = High Speed Download Packet Access which is the technology built on top of the GSM network. It's sort of like Telus and Bell using EVDO though EVDO currently doesn't support streaming voice and data at the same time for features such as video calling. Rogers actually upgraded this in the past year to HSPA which is a standard in Europe and Asia. As for the CDMA carriers migrating to GSM it's going to be a long while, probably another year or two.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Speed_Packet_Access

nothing has been announced

Submitted by Unregistered (not verified) on July 26, 2008 - 10:51am.
Neither TELUS nor Bell have "announced" anything. There are only rumours and speculation at this point.