According to a new report–and a little common sense–the consensus seems to be that a Verizon iPhone would drop fewer phone calls than its AT&T counterpart. Nothing too shocking there, right? I mean, that’s sort of the whole reason so many customers are eagerly awaiting Apple’s rumored January announcement of a Verizon handset.
A Verizon iPhone would actually be bolstered by its own limitations–the fact that the CDMA carrier can’t surf the Web while taking phone calls (unlike AT&T’s GSM technology) means that phone calls are less likely to be dropped due to data clogging the bandwidth.
“One of the things about CDMA is that most CDMA operators are set up to be voice first, data second,” a spokesman for the CDMA Development Group told MSNBC. “If you are browsing a Web page and you get a call coming in, the data will stop and the call will go through.”
Think of it this way: Verizon’s 3G data protocol is called EVDO–that acronym initially stood for Evolution-Data Only, meaning that the service just does data, not calls. There is a separate channel for calls. AT&T’s 3G network, meanwhile, does both.
In the next year, CDMA will be offering “simultaneous voice and data optimization,” according to the CDMA development group. While the chipset will allow users to surf the Web while making calls, data and voice will remain on separate channels, meaning that, at least theoretically, one won’t interfere with the other.
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