Cdma20001xAdvanced
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Sprint confirms its HD Voice is incompatible with the iPhone 5
The new, lighter iPhone 5 has a bigger screen, punchier processor, LTE and dual-band WiFi, but if you plan to pick one up for Sprint's network, you can't have it all. Carrier spokesperson Michelle Leff Mermelstein told Phone Scoop that its version of HD Voice will not work on Apple's new wünderphone. While most carriers use WCDMA networks to achieve the greater definition, Sprint uses CDMA 1X Advanced, which unfortunately isn't compatible with the handset. Knowing the feature will be missing prior to launch isn't ideal, but when you're calling your friends to boast about that day-one purchase, a slight drop in clarity isn't likely to kill your geek buzz.
Sprint lays out strategy for iDEN sunset, refreshed CDMA network
CDMA2000 isn't getting any younger -- but it's a spring chicken compared to iDEN, a network that has remained the de facto standard for push-to-talk fanatics against all odds, surviving occasional challenges to the throne and Boost Mobile's desire to dip its toes in the CDMA waters from time to time over the past couple years. It can't live on forever, though, and Sprint's senior VP of networks has dropped some new knowledge this week on how it plans to address the issue. The crux of the strategy -- which spans seven to ten years on Sprint's roadmap -- involves deploying new base station equipment that will be considerably more flexible, capable of running anything from CDMA to WiMAX to LTE with little more than a software tweak, and increasing the power output on those base stations which will allow the company to reduce the total number of towers it operates and overcome some of the reduced building penetration seen in the higher frequencies. Somewhere along the way it'd like to move its iDEN customer base to a CDMA-based PTT solution -- something it already tried (and failed) with QChat -- and refresh its CDMA footprint with 1X Advanced, which is considerably more efficient for voice and should allow the company to generally make better use of its spectrum. With Sprint's relationship with Clearwire in a somewhat strange place right now, a robust network strategy that can survive on its own two feet if necessary seems like a wise idea -- and freeing up iDEN spectrum for more modern technologies is probably a good place to start.
New lease on life: 3GPP2 publishes CDMA2000 1X Advanced spec
All the next-gen focus seems to be on HSPA+, WiMAX, and LTE these days, but make no mistake, CDMA's alive and well -- and even for the world's present-day CDMA carriers planning to migrate to LTE, legacy cells will be critical assets for years (if not decades) to come. To that end, the CDMA Development Group has announced that the 3GPP2 has published official specifications for CDMA2000 1X Advanced, which bundles a whole bunch of tweaks and enhancements geared toward significantly increasing voice capacity on 1X airwaves (up to four times current capacity, theoretically). This'll give LTE carriers a technology path that should easily carry CDMA through the end of its life without oversaturation, and as an added bonus, it frees up space for more EV-DO spectrum. Perhaps more interestingly, the CDG is talking up simultaneous 1X Voice and EV-DO data -- SVDO -- which should finally close a big gap that EV-DO suffers against its UMTS / HSPA counterparts and deliver on a promise originally intended to be delivered by Qualcomm's EV-DV tech back in the day. 1X Advanced upgrades are expected to be available to carriers in the second half of 2010, and SVDO is anticipated to hit around the same time. [Via Phone Scoop]
