Steven Den Beste, in his usual inimitable style, has a great discussion on the relative merits of CDMA/CDMA2k vs. GSM/GPRS/WCDMA.   He's reacting to an excellent Economist article describing the mess that Euro-operators are currently in.   From the Economist: 

Imposing W-CDMA as a single standard in 3G now looks like a big mistake. Far from reinforcing Europe's leadership in wireless, it has done the opposite. Morgan Stanley recently concluded that Asia now leads the world in the adoption of 3G, followed by America. Europe is last.

...That is because as Europe struggles with W-CDMA, a rival 3G technology called CDMA2000 is working well elsewhere.

...In Japan, CDMA2000-1X and W-CDMA are competing head to head, and the results make grim reading for European operators. Japan's NTT DoCoMo launched the world's first commercial W-CDMA network in October 2001. Since then, it has signed up a mere 135,000 subscribers, far short of expectations.

Its rival KDDI, in contrast, launched a CDMA2000-1X service in April 2002, and has already signed up 2.3m customers.

It's very difficult to summarize Den Beste's article (he goes into very well presented technical depth) but a key point he made is worth quoting here.   Basically, the various European mobile operators are having a hard time b/c of technological constraints within their nationally mandated technology base:

And others are beginning to ask if they can have permission to deploy CDMA2K instead, but the bureaucrats in the EU aren't having any of it. Yet.

I confess to a deep feeling of satisfaction about this on a personal level, primarily because of all the horseshit I put up with from GSM fans over the years when they talked about how superior the European approach to this was.

The thing is that if the US had followed the same policy, CDMA would never have been given the chance to prove itself. We now have just as good of nationwide systems and just as much portability as the Europeans do, only our system is fundamentally better.

While I agree w/ Den Beste that, at the RF level, CDMA2k is superior, it doesn't quite provide the gaurantee that CDMA2k will be a long term winner for operators from the revenue side of the equation.  

The essence of the RF level superiority is that the move from CDMA --> CDMA2k is easier than the move from GSM --> WCDMA because the former maintains spectrum backward compatibility while the latter does NOT.    Protocol-wise, CDMA2k and WCDMA are at rough parity.

There are, however, many layers of the proverbial wireless stack and the RF protocol -- CDMA2k vs. WCDMA -- is just one of the layers.  It's an important one, but winning the battle in this layer will NOT secure success in others.  A few of the diffs that translate into real revenue at the end of the day:

• SMS as a killer app in GSM
• Widely deployed cross operator roaming in GSM
• SIMs & consumer owned handsets (although this cuts both ways)

The fact of the matter is that CDMA/CDMA2k is still lacking the KEY money maker app deployed across GSM-land -- SMS.   It's a trivially simple app (and I'll be the first to admit that) but it will be a long time before the CDMA community has this feature in as universal availability as in GSM.

And in the consumer communications game, service ubiquity is everything.

I work in the mobile industry as well and a few months ago, I cranked out a few revenue statistics for overall revenue contribution of data services across CDMA and GSM operators:

• (CDMA) KDDI -- 13% from WAP
• (2.5G / WCDMA) Docomo -- 20% from iMode
• (GSM) Czech Radio Mobile -- 16% from SMS

Stats on their own always lie but I think there are a couple of interesting points to be here:

• Czech Radio Mobile is actually in the same ballpark as KDDI and Docomo in terms of next gen data services contribution from blindly following the GSM/SMS specs
• gross profitability -- the gross margins for SMS traffic are in the 90% ballpark for the operator while gross margins for data traffic trend towards those of voice (15-30%)
• cost of revenue -- the Czech radio mobile folks -- God bless 'em -- are simply 2-3 tiers below KDDI and Docomo w.r.t. the $$$ and the IQ they've invested into delivering their services to subscribers.    Put simply, the GSM/SMS biz can be run more cheaply than the KDDI/Docomo biz
• installed base -- SMS capability is in practically 100% of GSM handsets both sold and CURRENTLY deployed.   More advanced data services have uptake issues that the CDMA community will have to tackle for years to come.