“Every single VZW engineer and suit I’ve talked to. And I’ve talked to a few, being friends with a lot of VZ people here in DFW and being a regular visitor to their national NOC north of the airport.”
Your friends at Verizon are all wrong, or you misunderstood what they were telling you. There is nothing precluding multi-tasking in the CDMA air interface. That’s a hardware issue.
I don’t care what brand of phone anyone uses. That’s up to them.
All I know is that *as implemented by Verizon* and per their engineers, they can’t multiplex voice and data. As they’ve told me the only way that VZ can do it is to upgrade most of their system... and since it costs about as much to do that as it does to just give up and move to LTE, well...
My understanding is it’s the current version of CDMA that can’t do it.
Verizon is skipping the next level so to speak to go direct to LTE.
So yes, CDMA actually CAN allow voice and data simultaneously, but only the newer technology.