LTE triumphant? Barcelona brings CDMA carriers into the GSM Association

The following is a guest post by TC2 managing director Ben Fox, who is based in London.

This week's 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has been the setting for a number of significant developments in the global mobile marketplace. One of the most significant for enterprise users is the announcement that China Telecom, KDDI and Verizon Wireless, three of the world's largest CDMA operators, have joined the GSM Association (GSMA).

The force that is bridging the CDMA and GSM worlds is the worldwide adoption of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) 3+G (or 4G, depending on the day) standard.

This week's GSMA announcement is further proof that the world is moving to a single global mobile standard, which would bring benefits to all parties, including mobile device manufacturers, carriers and end-users. All parties, that is, except those who don't adopt the standard!

Device manufacturers will be able to focus all their efforts on a single technology platform. Carriers will be able to seamlessly interwork with each other -- even Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, whose incompatible technologies have made them strange bedfellows up until now. And ultimately, we hope, end users won't need to worry about their Verizon Wireless smartphone not working when they travel to Europe (although they will undoubtedly still need to worry about the cost of international roaming).

U.S. users also should not overlook the importance of China Telecom and KDDI joining at the same time as Verizon Wireless. China Telecom is the largest state-owned telecom operator in China, and KDDI is Japan's second-largest cellular operator. We're going to be watching China Telecom's next steps in this space very closely, because historically Chinese carriers have specifically avoided adopting western technologies and instead sought to develop their own solutions. This could signal the beginning of the end of that policy.

Of course the elephant in the room that the announcement ignores is WiMax, the competing 4G technology. Despite being first to market, WiMax does not appear to reach the projected speeds of LTE and, much more importantly, has far less backing from heavyweight global carriers.

Thus describing it as an elephant is probably far too generous. WiMax no doubt has a future in certain key areas such as fixed wireless and greenfield infrastructure builds, but the fact is that the major players are all lining up behind LTE, which makes LTE the hot favourite for the future global mobile standard.

In fact, in a number of ways the world's leading carriers are either acknowledging or finally catching up to technological reality, and this isn't the only announcement from Barcelona that bears this out. Verizon Wireless and Skype have announced that Verizon Wireless will enable Skype calling over its network. I'll have some thoughts about that for the enterprise segment tomorrow.