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Single-Chip GSM Phone on Virtual Horizon?
An anonymous reader writes "There's still the alphabet soup and corporate conflicts regarding cell phone standards in the U.S. but... there might be some hope for a single-chip GSM phone, which might open up some interesting possibilities."
When will be seeing some of this technologu translated into Cumputer HardWare. I am Sure That I am not the only person who would love to see an integrated cpu/memory/GPU/etc on one chip.
(granted Nvidia's Nforce technolgy is getting starting to some of these functions, I am seeking something on a grander scale)
By the way, what are the "passives" shown in the first image? They are not mentioned in the article. The single chip has 25 passives? Do we want that? What does that mean?
This could be great, or a non-issue. In the US, GSM operates on different frequencies than the rest of the world. their are a few high (56K) providers in the US, but the footprint is less than optimal. As a pratical matter for us globe wondering types, the only part of a GSM phone that can be used from the us to europe is the User ID / phone book chip. Even then, you have to arrange it with your carrier & rates are exorbitant.
;)
Now if you could put this with a faster processor aka the old cyrex chip you could get a great handheld
On top of that, so far, they've only posted the story once...
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
Is this your problem, or Slashdot's? What do you think?
Now, here are some essential bits for you. GSM is a second-generation, all-digital mobile-phone standard used all over the world except some major parts of North America. The multi-user access scheme is a (somewhat weird, IMHO) mix of frequency and time multiplexing; there's no CDMA involved. It has been design with lots of competing providers and networks in mind, therefore it has great roaming capabilities. Furthermore, since most billing mechanisms (outside of North America, that is) involve NO AIRTIME CHARGES, and actually provide for cheaper in-network connections than those of stationary phones, GSM captured the market overnight. Most GSM-covered countries (including ones far less wealthy than US and Canada) sport coverage and penetration rates that still sound like science fiction over here (US/CAN). GSM also comes with cheap cross-provider messaging (called SMS) which is as popular as actual phonecalls especially among the poor population.
There are pop-machines with phonenumbers attached to them, from which you can buy your daily dose of Canned Capitalism (COKE) by dialing the number -- the cost will be charged on your phonebill. This is just one example of things those "less developed" countries already have. Now, imagine what possibilites does a one-chip GSM phone open up in societies where almost everybody has a cellphone!
Who wants GSM?
It's so weakly encrypted, anyone with a cheap pentium can crack it real-time.
Companies in England & France have problems with industrial espionage -- people sit on each side of the channel with parabolic dishes and listen in on other companies' cell calls.
Who needs that?
At least CDMA requires military-grade equipment to crack in nearly-real-time.
You can keep your GSM crap-ola.
--NBVB
p.s. We can put twice the amount of calls in the same spectrum using CDMA vs. GSM. Also a Good Thing.
A slightly more well known source reports on the TI GSM chip.
I have no clue either. The article doesn't even bother to define its new Acronymn. Everyone needs a TLA nowadays. Three Letter Acronymn.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
ganderfuck - what the hell are you talking about. Virtually every other country charges by the minute - the US is virtually the only one with widespread packages of minutes. That is why all the dirty eurotrash do sms messages, because they are cheaper. They indeed have wider coverage for cells because they are geographically smaller - I could throw a rock across some of those half-ass eurospunk countries. Also, the US forced the entire country to be wired with copper when they let Ma Bell have her monopoly - so the US is far better covered by land lines. And the number of places that actually have those fancy coke machines is pretty damn small. I like the old machines so I can poor salt water in the slots and short them out.
They have it already. National Semicondictor's Geode chipset is everything.. FPU,GPU all you need is some RAM..3 96,00.html
http://www.national.com/appinfo/solutions/0,2062,
how many chips are now in phones? is a single chip a cost and power advantage?
You can always Google for the history of GSM, as well as tons of resources on the spectrum and technologies behind GSM.
THBT.
THL.
HAND.
SMBRBDLF.
Come on folks, what is the probability some acronym actually corresponds to "Goat Sex Man"? 1 in 26^3?
The same problems seem to exist with cell phone technologies and broadband distribution. Yes GSM exists. Yes broadband exists. But when can EVERYONE get it EVERYWHERE? I am beginning to think NEVER!
If they can keep making them phone chips smaller and smaller, maybe someday someday we get 'em put into earrings & all look like Bajorans! (Bejorans?) (Bojorans?)
Yeah, but what do those big sleepy lugs know?
Maybe they should've included a few elves and dwarves in their focus groups, and prehaps the odd orc or two...
-R
Stuff that matters: circuitbreakers, vacuum-cleaners coffee makers, calculators generators, matching salt+pepper shakers
GPRS anyone?
GSM is analog switched technology... GPRS is packet based. Lets see... which one do we want? Since GSM never really took off in the US, why not work on getting GPRS standard accepted in the US (and north america for that matter)... why pus for GSM, which, as many others have pointed out is not as secure, has poor bandwidth usage, considering CDMA as a competitor, and suffers from insane 'big brother' cell tower syndrom (or whatever you wanna call it when the phone is constantly telling the tower where it is, and what it's doing).
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Actually, the total number of chips on on GSM phone that would be usable is two... one chip for the phone functionality and the other chip is the SIM card.
As for having my furniture rat me out for not putting it together strictly following their cryptic instructions, I'm not ready to volunteer for that as of yet. And just imagine the airwaves pollution if all these new devices were phoning willy-nilly.
Keep trying brother troll! One day you will get it right, and then you can proudly claim "First Corpse!"
Aargh ... Why are you being so difficult? Most western countries have agreed to adapt GPRS as a temporary standard before a UMTS-net is up and running. You are moving towards isolation regarding mobile technology, that isn't good. Not for you and not for the other 95.5% of the world population. (world PopClock and cia factbook)
Look a monkey!
Why is it that whenever someone mentions European GSM/GPRS coverage, someone else must try and convince everyone else that the US has better land-line coverage?
Here is a quick hint for you: The US telephone network is at best directly comparable to 90% of the European Union member countries land line networks. The GSM/GPRS coverage is in addition to a perfectly fine land line network.
Stop trying to delude yourself. The US lags behind on telecoms infastructure.
At least we know what doesn't work, and go with that.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
Now you can blame all the stupidity on a single chip.
Following site has maps of GSM coverage in various countries
There have maps for some countries to compare:
USA
Tunisia
China
Vietnam
I'm European and found his post rather amusing: good reply, though you seem to have an anti-North American thing going on! I just can't stand bloody Bush leading Blair into a Blood agreement on the Oil wars. You were wrong though in generalising about Europe: plenty of European countries have their media closely affiliated/controlled by political/economical forces. Check Italy, for one.
Its a troll, but he's right on one count. I can't speak for all GSM countries, but in France billing is VERY by the minute. 120 minutes == 50 (==$). That is why people use SMS.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
In the meantime, the rest of the world saw sense and adopted a single standard. The consequence is you can buy a phone in Thailand and use it in Ireland, you can fly from South Africa to India and still be in touch with head office.
The recalcitrance and obstinacy in the US to develop their own standard except through Gladiator-style death matches has left them isolated and way behind the rest of the world. At the end of the day it doesn't matter if the naysayers think CDMA or some variant was technically better than GSM because it still lost. Hopefully the US will learn better the next time around.
With this chip, how long before a disposable phone? Seems to me that this is what that industry has been begging for.
the entire US is also lagging behind in terms of not even TRYING to adopt the metric system that the REST OF THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD uses.
all americans know how to do is drive gus gazzling SUVs filled with cheap gas, of which the fuel economy, they insist on measuring in MILES per GALLON.
Fuck you. I live in Paris. (sometimes Madrid) To receive a call is free. That was the point of the original post.
So, you go to hell, and you die....
Score: -1, Flaming Hog Anus.
Over here (UK) we pay by the minute, but SMS is rapidly becoming more popular than voice anyway (at 1p/message it's dirt cheap). The providers are busily trying to get everyone to buy colour phones with cameras so we can send pictures to each other - 'Be the first With a Nokia 7something' (Umm.. if I'm the first who am I supposed to send my pictures to?)
yea yea, just like the metric system that the rest of the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD is using. i don't see the US even *TRYING* to make an effort to adopt any sort of standard unless its for the benefit of its FUCKING ECONOMY.
all americans know how to do is drive gus gazzling SUVs filled with cheap gas, of which the fuel economy, they insist on measuring in MILES per GALLON.
Now that I think of it, yes, all of them.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Yeah americans are just like linux users. Instead of using a technology like windows that the rest of the world is using, they have to go off and invent there own OS just to be recalcitrant and obstinant. Even it is technological superior wouldn't everyone be better off if we all used the same system? More seriously GSM and CDMA are basically washes technology wise. Both have advantages and disadvantages ( but you will notice the 3g(not gprs) version of GSM is very similiar the CDMA technology. ) . The big issue as always is who gets the money. The royalties for GSM and CDMA are about hte same for a 3rd party company but someone like Nokia does much better with GSM since they have half the patents. The big problem with the US wireless market is multiple carriers. Each carrier spends a ton of money in each big market duplicating each others effort. If they could have worked together (major handwaving) you could have 3x the capacity in the dense areas and in the low coverage area you could have covered 3 times the area for the same net expendure.
I agree. North Americans providers didn't adopted a standard and it still hurts them. (but it made some company like Qualcomm rich).
There are GSM providers in North America. The only problem is that they don't use the same frequencies (the old 900MHz and the new 1800MHz) than in the rest of the world.
The US army was already using the 1800 frequency so they had to use an other one (1900). That's why your phone is incompatible. There are phones that can work under the 3 GSM frequencies (900/1800/1900)
GSM is in North America since at least 5 years. (Voicestream in US and Microcell/Fido in Canada ) GSM is progressing in North America, some providers are replacing their digital network with GSM. (i.e. AT&T in the US and Rogers in Canada)
Thanks for the tip. I find it funny though that your comment was modded up, when it did not even bother to define what the acronym actually stands for. How would I know I encountered the "real GSM" that is being referred to in the article?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Wow, that must make for a REALLY small phone. How the hell are we supposed to dial?! :)
It's kinda hard to receive a call when no one can afford to initiate one... :-p
I just got a cell phone last month, and it is GSM based.
I am using Voicestream service with a new Samsung phone, works great.
Mod parent up.
Imagine the applications for this.
You could put 'invisible' GSM 'phones' into lots of things. Shoes. Coats. etc. Now you can be spied on with greater efficiency.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
If you look at the history of telephony in the US you can understand why it has evolved the way it has compared to Europe.
First of all, land lines are significantly cheaper in the US than in Europe. And the phone companies are required to bring a line to your MPOE. There are places that people live in europe where you still can't get a land line, even in 2002. We did the hard work for the last mile problem and some places in Europe haven't. And the high cost of landlines increased demand for the cheaper mobile services.
Secondly, analog cell service had good coverage in the US when the first digital technologies came out. Maybe if the folks who had designed GSM had thought about how the US was gonna roll it out then they would have realized that the ability to fall back to analog would help the rollout. The folks at Qualcomm got it, as did the inventors of TDMA.
The US is much less dense than europe in terms of cell users. Therefore building out a brand new network is expensive and the lack of density means that it's hard to recoup the cost of the towers in remote places. That makes it hard to roll out a technology that's backwards compatable.
Don't get me wrong, I like GSM. I have a GSM phone. And I wish it was better rolled out here. Although I like the tech, I will be the first to admit that my TDMA phone gets much better coverage. I don't think that the existence of other formats is an attempt at American isolationism but rather a combination of the nature of America (a lot of sparse areas), the shortsightedness of GSM not offering the ability to speak analog, and the cost of upgrading vs. the need to make money.
And by the way, if you're gonna bag on the US for not using GSM then don't forget that Japan, one of the worlds densest cell markets, doesn't use GSM either.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
GSM, CDMA, TDMA, ... There are many standards. I'm not much of a radio engineer, but I'll bet I could come up with a different one that would work in a few days. (It would suck compared to the ones we have now) Who cares though, the point is the standard, the point is the phone works. I've used GSM, CDMA, and a couple other standards IT DIDN'T MATTER! Thats right, all the standards work. You the consumer does not need to care.
Watch service areas. Look for features that you will use. Engineers could build a phone with all standards built in, if they wanted to. (tri-band GSM is common, as is dual band analog/digital) It turns out though, most places in the US that you travel either has coverage in all standards, or no coverage in any.
I don't get why people care which standard their phone uses. That is something for the phone companies to worry about.
Well, after telling its wireless customers for the past few weeks that it will be the first to offer GSM on the east coast of the US, ATT Wireless finally did it.
Hmm. First of all not only was ATT not the first to use this technology on the east coast [Voicestream, Verizon, and even Nextel have been using it for quite some time now], but they are also trying to get people to pay $40 a month to use it...
The story is here.
I personally use Nextel. They have the IDEN network, which is more secure than GSM and CDMA, but also support GSM [on certian phones] for use internationally.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
I find it funny though that your comment was modded up,when it did not even bother to define what the acronym actually stands for
The Subject header is your friend.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Ah, now I see. I thought it might have meant Gay Single Men, as another poster mentioned.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The whole thing with density is nonsense, Finland is far less dense than the USA, and is the leading cellular phone country. If there is a density issue at all, then it is urban density, and the USA is not short on that. To have a successful cellular service you do NOT need to serve every corver of Utah or Alaska, or northern lapland for that matter.
Passives are "dumb" components- resistors, capacitors, diodes, etc. This is in contrast to ICs, or chips. Less passive components are better... easier to design for, faster assembly, smaller board size, more energy efficiency, and less suppliers / stock to worry about.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Hmm. Come to think of it, if I happen to be dialing the right number, that might come in handy!
Trees everywhere, and not a forest in sight.
The concept of doing RF processing in a chip that has digital electronics is scary, but apparently that's now possible without the noise from the digital circuitry wiping out the incoming signal.
Provided that you have the same phone as the receiver (either the Nokia 7650 or the Ericsson T68i) it works most of the time. This again works only, when you are on the same network as the receiver.
Regardless if the message arrives or not and is legible by the receiver you still get to pay ~55 cents for the privilege.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
All you have to do is live in one of the other 199 countries of the world. Us non-Americans have been used for years to carrying our GSM phones around the world with us and making phone calls wherever we are (except, of course, in the USA).
...
Does anyone know why the USA insists on being different to the rest of humanity?? - it's not just phones, it's also the only country with its own paper sizes, it's the only country still using slugs and foot-poundals, and so on
also, in finland there was an analog net as well.
and landlines did go to pretty much everywhere electricity went, lack of landlines had pretty much no impact on the adaptation of cellular phones. the cheapness and the 'fairness' of the system however did(you know pretty much how much you'll be paying and don't pay for receiving magazine sellers calls, and the system is cheap enough for parents to buy phones for their kids too and still feed them).
also, you can't carry a landline around the town, and pagers are just plain silly compared to having a phone of the same size).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If it's going to be all on a chip, how about handling all of the protocols - CDMA, TDMA, GSM - a programmable format would be the best, since there will ALWAYS be multiple formats to deal with....
First, I'm a fan of GSM since it is an open standard made by the ETSI guys. Go to http://www.etsi.org get an account and download the standards. I'm curious about your statement on saying IDEN is more secure than GSM or CDMA. IDEN is Radio and TDMA combined, and propietary. GSM & TDMA are not more secure than CDMA, as CDMA is base on code access using orthogonal functions. GSM and TDMA are somewhat similar in that they both provide multiple access to one channel through multiple time slots, hence being less secure. The cool thing about GSM (me favorite) and CDMA from a service provider is they actually have an upgrade path to 3G, TDMA does not or at least it won't be supported. GSM (circuit switched) goes to GPRS (packet switched) then to your choice of EDGE or WCDMA. Sim cards will be supported through the entire path. For the CDMA guys CDMA to CDMA 1X to CDMA2000, Qualcom earns royalties off this technology(me least favorite). From the service providers view it is cost effecient if they choose CDMA or GSM and stick with the upgrade path. Cingular & AT&T find themselves switching from TDMA to GSM, because no one is really providing an upgrade path for TDMA, although a standard was written for TDMA based 3G, no one will support it. By the way, Verizon is a CDMA based network and over 80% of the world uses GSM. IDEN who?
Watch out! They'll have a -1, unpatriotic karma mod next..