Secondly, research has shown that consumers first like to choose their handset and then the service provider. This behaviour suits GSM, which works on an easy-to-change chip placed inside the phone. The CDMA phone, on the other hand, is tied to the network. Third, CDMA is proprietary technology and entails royalty for Qualcomm, founded in 1985 by San Diego professor Irwin Jacobs.
It is not surprising that while CDMA loyalists are now wooing GSM, no GSM operator is looking to replicate his network with CDMA.
Victor beware
Sometime in the first half of the 1990s, when it seemed imminent that the government would open up telecom to the private sector, a top management consultancy firm made a presentation to the top executives of Reliance. The gist of it was that the company should stay away from telecom. It involved retail and consumer interface, which was not the company's forte.
When the time came to bid for the first round of mobile telephone licences, late patriarch Dhirubhai Ambani was already taken in by the idea of cheap mobile services (which morphed later into a-call-for-the-cost-of-a-postcard concept) and told his people to divide the bid amounts by 10 and submit.
Image: Chief Operating Officer of Tata Teleservices, Debashis Sur poses with the new 'Samsung Explore' mobile phone in New Delhi in September, 2007. | Photograph: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images
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