Re: The Wireless Showdown of 2008

Yes. Verizon did two surprising things last week. One was that they
> said that they will (sometime in the future) allow customers to use > any handset they want so long as it's technically compatible. AT&T > and T-Mo have done that for years, as long as they've been GSM. At > the moment this only means CDMA equipment from Sprint, but ... > > The other is that Verizon said that their upgrade path will be LTE, > the next version of GSM, rather than Qualcomm's next generation CDMA.

Thanks for the info. Did original posting say any of that? All I read were in it statements like, "Google as the master of eyeballs, of clicks, of searches, of the database of our intentions dressed in rainbow shorts." that didn't say anything.

Anyway, could you explain what LTE is and who Qualcomm is?

What will this change do for existing Verizon customers and their phones? Will they be forced to buy new handsets?

No, you have to read the papers.

LTE is the largely meaningless acronym Long Term Evolution. It's the next version of GSM. See

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Qualcomm is a company in San Diego that has done a lot of the development on CDMA and holds many patents on the CDMA system that Verizon and Sprint currently use. LTE happens to use CDMA technology (as chip processing power improves, CDMA increasingly works better than the TDMA that current GSM uses) but it's not a Qualcomm project.

Eventually you'll have to buy a new handset for the same reason that AMPS users have had to bite the bullet and buy a CDMA or GSM handset. You'll probably want to buy a new handset sooner than that if you want to use LTE's higher data rate and other goodies.

R's, John