launched a joint patent licensing program, offering a license to collection of CDMA2000 patents. The portfolio of patents included in the program are owned by France Telecom; Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp; NTT DoCoMo; KPN and Siemens (June 2009). ZTE claims to have made the first VoIP call on Rev. B (February 2009). Next Generation Mobile Communications Ecosystem As UMB has been discontinued from the roadmap of telecom industry, the EV-DO operators have been aligning their evolution to EPS (or 3G-LTE). Motorola has demoed a EV-DO Rev. A to EPS handoffs in March 2008 while Alcatel-Lucent executed the same task in January 2010 to secure the investments of EV-DO operators. A number of EV-DO tier 1 operators namely Verizon Wireless, Bell Mobility, TELUS Mobility, and SO on, have publicly ditched their support for UMB and have announced plans to migrate to EPS. Despite all the setbacks, Chinese and Japanese operators are still holding out to EV-DO Rev. B. China Telecom and KDDI in Japan are still committed to EV-DO Rev. B. PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited) launched EV-DO Rev. B in summer of 2010 offering peak date rate of 9.3 Mbps. In general, smaller EV-DO operators will likely follow a wait and see approach of whether to pursue the EPS path or CDG roadmap. 5.10 Summary Insights CDMA2000 1xEV-DO technology was discussed in detail in Chapter 5. The characteristics of the different revisions Rev. 0, Rev. A and Rev. B of EV-DO were presented. We also briefly touched upon UMB air interface standard and on CDMA450. In the following sections we discussed the comparative performance of EV-DO revisions, EV-DO evolution, migration to LTE and the industry outlook for the EV-DO technology. The two key challenges for EV-DO operators are: How to compete with the growing demands of HSPA and HSPA+. How and when to cost effectively evolve either to WiMAX or to LTE to save their investments and their future. The first challenge can be addressed with aggressive R&D, proper marketing and a roll-out of multicarrier