Nokia Hooks Into North American Market
Nokia has built its dominating lead in the global handset market by focusing on GSM. Meanwhile their US presence has been limited to TDMA carriers, but 40% of US subscribers are on CDMA networks. To increase their US market share they are starting to test CDMA2000 1xEV-DV handsets, which is the next step up from today’s CDMA2000 1xRTT networks deployed by Sprint PCS and Verizon. However neither SprintPCS nor Verizon have immediate plans to upgrade to 1xEV-DV so there won’t be any short term CDMA gains for Nokia. TDMA carriers’ transition to GSM will have bigger impact on their market share.
