It was 1989 and I was then head of R&D at NYNEX. We saw that the analog cellular systems were soon to run out of capacity and we needed to go digital. We needed to do this change quickly. This was a time when we had no single R&D group, Bell Labs was gone, and historically they were always too slow. We had to now rely on American entrepreneurial leadership, a change for the regulated telephone world.
Irwin Jacobs, from Qualcomm, my former advisor from MIT some 25-30 years earlier came pitching CDMA. This was an elegant and doable approach which solved so many problems. I saw the potential immediately and became "Paul on the road to Ephesus". Sitting besides by biblical horse I went about selling the idea.
But, ATT, and especially SW Bell, now ATT, had chosen a TDMA standard and Jacobs and myself and a few others chose to go CDMA, because it was clearly better.
The SW Bell folks were adamant, and wrong. They chose TDMA.
Thus there was a war on amongst the cellular carriers in the US.
Meanwhile, slowly the Europeans were developing a different standard, GSM, but mobile was slower to develop in Europe yet we had a real problem in the US, cellular was growing faster and we had introduced portable phones at lower power.Thus we saw portable phones, more users, greater demands and a need to get out of analog before it was impossible to do so. You see the FCC had mandated auctions which made getting more spectrum impossible in the short run.
Thus we in the US had to make a decision earlier. And decide we did.
By late 1990 I became COO at NYNEX cellular and my prime task was clearly to sort out this mess. I brought all carriers together in September 1991 in California and we got a significant agreement, five of the 7 agreed on CDMA. SW Bell, now ATT, was the prime hold out, they stuck with TDMA. They later bought a company which had GSM, which is why they are GSM now. So many accidents of history.
One thing we, the carriers, did not want was the FCC saying or doing anything. The FCC, incompetent as usual, would have taken longer and made the wrong choice.
The Times states:
The continent’s system is looser in part because Europe settled on a single technological standard for wireless carriers 20 years ago. Countries there wanted to ensure that their citizens’ phones would work as they traveled throughout the Continent. No such agreement was reached in the United States, which had recently deregulated its telephone industry, and carriers built their networks on separate technologies.
“I’d call it the culture of competition,” said Alex Hills, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, explaining why a single standard was not set in the United States. “There was interest in allowing the standards to compete with one another, and let the market decide who would win.”
It was not a culture of competition. As the one who worked the problem it was the exploding market growth and the fact that the technology was changing rapidly and there were people in the system who "felt" their way was the best way. Was CDMA better, yes, is GSM good as a standard, yes, is GSM better, as a single standard yes, not as a technology.
We now are entering 4G which because of the advances in technology uses a much more efficient standard. Hopefully we will not see the Tower of Babel here, but the reason is not because we did not have enough regulation, if we had we would still be using auto based luggable phones.
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