Who said CDMA violates the law of physics.

Many proponents of CDMA technology, when inquired about the early days of CDMA, say that it was a tough time pushing the technology. Some Stanford professor even said CDMA violates the law of physics.

I have already been curious who said this and did some research. It turns out that in the Jan/Feb 1997 edition of IEEE internet computing, the name was mentioned in an interview "George Glider on the bandwidth of plenty", Bruce Lusignan.

Here is the quoted text from this interview "
For some reason people were unusually intense in opposition to CDMA technology. Bruce Lusignan, a brilliant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, said that CDMA, as Qualcomm described it, violates the laws of physics—and this was quoted over and over again. So that laws of physics—laws of God, if you will—were involved in this debate! And because it was said to violate the laws of physics, lots of people jumped to the conclusion that Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi (of the Viterbi algorithm fame) were pushing a technology scam!
"

It was also interesting to see that Bruce later obviously changed his opinion as he also published a number of papers on receiver design for IS-95 CDMA technology.

Bruce's original comment was hard to find, but I got something in one article (" Down to the Wireless - Stakes High as Rivals Race to Provide Next Generation of Celluar Gear") published online in May 1996 edition on LA Times website. This article quoted Bruce's comments as follows "

On the other side of the aisle is Bruce B. Lusignan, professor of electrical engineering and director of the communications satellite planning center at Stanford University, who contends that CDMA technology is actually something of a hoax and will ultimately result in a loss of capacity compared with the gains offered by other digital signaling methods.

'The basic problem is that it does not have anywhere near adequate protection from the fading that the other techniques all have,' said Lusignan, who said his lab has been studying the underlying technology, known as spread spectrum, for 20 years. 'That makes it completely inadequate to achieve the type of capacities that they have been advertising.'

"

In the book "The Qualcomm Equation", the author also pointed out that "In several forusm, two Stanford professors, Bruce Lusignan and Don Cox, took CDMA to the task and concluded that the system essentially would not work as planned."