quickymart:

 

In terms of mobile phones, we desperately needed to move from the 025 network, with its very limited capabilities. All over the world analogue networks, including the world’s biggest, AT& T, were being phased out and handsets were no longer being produced. As nothing about technology stands still, we believed it was very important to get a third-generation product to market at speed. We knew there would be a choice of paths to whatever the next-generation technology was: we went with CDMA mobile technology for our network, partly because CDMA was the major technology used for mobile communications in North America, including by one of our then owners, Bell Atlantic, and it was popular throughout Asia, but also because we did not have a licence for GSM, which had a higher number of subscribers worldwide. (In fact, Telecom originally did have a licence for GSM some years before I joined, as did Bell South, which was later bought by Vodafone. I understood from Roderick [Deane, former Telecom CEO] that the government had required Telecom to sell its licence due to the view that it wouldn’t be good for competition for the two main players to be on the same technology.)

 

If this was indeed the case it sounds patently ridiculous IMO, especially given the fact that today we have (at least) two networks who operate exactly like that.

 

But that was a long time ago, and (as has been pointed out already) things have changed quite a bit since then.

 

If only GSM 850 existed back then we might have bypassed the IS54 and IS136 junk that was a dead end technology.