Telstra will switch off its CDMA network on January 28. For owners of phones on Telecom's network, the immediate implication is that they won't be able to make calls when they travel to Australia. Telecom has put forward two workarounds:

1) You can upgrade to one of its soon-to-be-expanding range of WorldMode phones, which run on both CDMA (used by Telecom) and W-CDMA and Edge/GPRS/GSM networks (used by Vodafone, and most other telcos around the world). In the new year, Telecom will add BlackBerry's WorldMode model - breaking Vodafone's monopoly on Research in Motion's wildly popular smartphone - plus a model from Samsung that will be very close to the Samsung BlackJack released in the US, and run on Windows Mobile 6.

2) You can borrow a phone from Telecom. Incoming GM of Business Solutions Greg McAlister - who will helm all small and medium business products; that is, those too small-fry for Gen-i - says that over the past two years 100,000 of Telecom's 2.1 million customers have travelled to Oz. Obviously, not all are going to upgrade to WorldMode phones at once, and not all of those who don't are going to be thrilled at the no-roaming news. That's the bad news.
The good news is that Telecom has quadrupled its stock of loan phones and PDAs, and McAlister says these will be free for those who require voice or data roaming during a trip across the ditch.

The above news comes from lunch with McAlister, a refreshingly straight-talking career Telecomer, plus a new-comer to the company, David Craig, who was recently appointed GM of Consumer Marketing (having spent most of his career in the UK working for spirits conglomerate Diageo).

Both have steep hills to climb, but big plans.

McAlister is eyeing hosted unified comms and other services for small business next year.

Craig is talking up a free security suite coming for YahooXtra Bubble users. He didn't shirk from the fact that the launch was a fiasco, yet Craig is also right that Yahoo's new premium services (known as Bubble here) have earned rave reviews overseas (including from our US parent publication). So it is possible that Craig has entered public life as a Telecom GM at the right time. Eventually as anger fades about the transitional foul-ups (and personally I'll keep simmering for a little while, having had to counsel friends and relatives) people will realise that the recently launched Flickr Pro accounts - with unlimited online storage - and other frills are actually pretty niftily executed.

CDMA kill date
McAlister also elaborated on Telecom's plans to build a network to the SIM card-friendly W-CDMA standard, as used by Vodafone et al, for its 3G network. He said main centres would be turned on around November next year, with the whole country covered by Telecom using the step-down bandwidth on that side of the fence (Edge/GPRS).
By 2013, Telecom will switch off its CDMA network.

LG Grooves to your car radio
Jumping back to the consumer side of the fence, Craig showed off a new cellphone from LG called the Groove, which will be released for Telecom's network in the new year. It's kicker is a built-in FM transmitter that can beam songs from the phone to your car stereo. It's like having an iPod and a Griffin iTrip in one (though memory is MicroSD, so you're limited to 1GB).