LAGOS: Rumors this past week increased that the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) in Nigeria was going to be phased out over the next five years in favor of GSM technology. However, the government said that this was not going to be happening, and that both systems would coincide with one another for the immediate future. The reason for maintaining the older system is that there doesn't appear to be any reason to get rid of it, as many smaller businesses are still running on the older system. Speaking to this point, Qualcomm's Managing Director for West Africa Alex Dadson said analysts and companies should not be fearful of the move to maintain both technologies for the immediate future. Dadson said that “there must have been a misunderstanding of the issue somewhere,” referring to the reports in local media that said the CDMA system was to be a thing of the past. “Both GSM and CDMA will likely co-exist as we do not expect any operator to roll out LTE nationwide on day one. “In fact, our chipset strategies anticipates this reality, which is why we will have dual mode LTE/UMTS/CDMA chips” for the foreseeable future, he added. All this comes as Nigeria continues to push forward on developing technology for its burgeoning telecom sector, which the government hopes will be instrumental in heading toward its goal of being a top 20 global economy by the end of the decade. BM
