The CDG has launched several recent initiatives to facilitate roaming between CDMA operators, including its Global Roaming Hub, and its Open Market Handset (OMH) initiative, the latter of which uses the SIM concept to separate handsets from the network.
One catch with the rise of roaming traffic in CDMA networks is that 1x operators planning to migrate to LTE will have to ensure their roaming strategies can migrate along with their networks, Radford said.
“LTE runs on a lot of different frequencies from CDMA, so multi-mode and multi-band handsets will be crucial to supporting their roaming strategies,” she said.
She said the CDG was working with handset makers, as well as 3GPP and 3GPP2, to ensure the specs for such handsets are in place and support backwards compatibility with legacy CDMA networks.
“CDMA isn’t going away anytime soon, so it’s important to support the needs of new CDMA operators in the LTE future,” Radford said.