Only a knave or a fool would argue that what we have today is the end-all of CDMA perfection. I have argued that IS-95 has incorporated many critical and excellent features, which in fact, are being imitated by the newly proposed standards just mentioned. Some of these proposals involve just parameter changes, designed to counter the competition, without noticing that it would also impact operators which have implemented CDMA, forcing them to scrap their current systems and start over, hardly a palatable alternative given their large capital investments. Rather let me comment on improvements to IS-95 which are easily implemented and are backward compatible to existing infrastructure. This, in fact, makes the reverse channel quite similar to the forward channel modulation.
Conservatism is the reason.
This proved to be an overly cautious decision. Second, if tight power control is a necessary feature, tighter power control is even better. This has been found to be particularly true for the forward link from base station to user, where power control was correctly deemed to be less critical and hence made very infrequent, but this turned out to limit performance. Also, means for reducing latency of the power control loops in both directions, will considerably improve performance. Another improvement certain to enhance capacity and coverage involves adaptive antenna array techniques.