USS Clueless I had glanced through part of this guy's ranting when Slashdot carried it. Having had some dealings with Qualcomm he certainly fits the mold for their engineers - as we used to say, he has certainly drunk the Coolaid.
He throws around a lot of terminology and makes a lot of potent arguments which all look great.
Except pretty much all of them are wrong! The Economist article he quotes was wrong too.
Where's he is right he hides that by trying to make the wrong point about it.
An example; there is no known upgrade path from GSM to CDMA - correct. But that also means, the point the Economist made, which was EU operators should "upgrade" to CDMA-2000 is impossible too.
CDMA-2000 is NOT 3G. It is packet based but its certainly not UMTS. There's bug all point in upgrading to something you already have in the form of GPRS.
GPRS: Yup its a pain in the bun to get working. It is expensive and it does fall over. OTOH, it works and is working now.
WCDMA and GSM are not compatable. But you can and they do make multi-mode phones - they don't work well.
The simple fact is GSM isn't just an EU thing anymore. There are GSM networks with full international roaming agreements in something like 144 countries. I can pretty much get off a plane anywhere on this planet, turn on my T-68 and be making calls, getting data and sending SMS within minutes without doing anything else. You can't do that with CDMA - it lost the global match. I'll conceed it was a superior technology, but that didn't help Sony with Betamax. It lost the global war. GSM is much easier to role out. There are more handsets and they are easier to change and upgrade.
Clueless' comment that the SIM card caused more trouble than it made in benefits is rubbish. I've lived in the US and I've used US cellphones - if they like living in the past, they're going about it the right way.
The interesting thing now is watching the big operators across the US rolling out GSM networks like there's no tomorrow. When I was there in 2001, you'd be lucky to find Voicestream - last week in Seattle I had a choice of 3 networks.
As it standards Qualcomm are now planning a coms stack which includes GSM/GPRS - looks like they, if not Mr Clueless, know what's best.
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