A few more points and I'm out...
To say that Verizon should have looked for alternatives for data is to gleefully glide past all of the inherent issues with making such a change. It's also revisionist.
First of all, there's real cost and effort for making a change outside of roadmap, and for most purposes, Verizon was following the Qualcomm roadmap and succeeding with it. It's not an easy thing at all to go in some other direction.
Will the handset manufacturers go along? Will the equipment manufacturers go along? How costly is it? Is it even feasible? I guess if you ignore all that change is easy.
At the time, there was no iPhone. I can tell you first hand data was considered a cool parlor trick by almost all operators. We were all waiting for the hockey stick, it never came until the iPhone arrived. So there was no vision that data needs were going to be something that needed to be handled.
I can also tell you first hand that Verizon thought the iPhone was a total joke for a very long time. This was a mistake on their part, for sure.
I spent many years in the industry, helping develop, deploy, optimize and manage systems across the globe with many operators. I lived these issues, I didn't read them in a blog post or in a magazine.
Verizon didn't suffer with CDMA.
* Adding: yes it's totally possible to have a crap, unoptimized, poorly performing network on any technology. Look at Sprint and Cricket - there's no comparison to Verizon. Also, within an operator, not all markets are equal, and some are designed better and managed better than others. Vendor choice also makes a huge difference.
