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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?
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!
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.
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.
UTMS, the next generation of GSM, includes all of the above features and provides a variety of air-interface technologies including CDMA, so the capacity issue isn't going to last very long. As far as I see, cdma2000 still lacks the above basic features, which I find absolutely increadible especially as GSM networks have been around now for much longer than IS-95 based stuff.
I was very relieved when AT&T started providing GSM in my area, after living here four years with only IS136 (D-AMPS/TDMA), cdmaOne, and NexTel networks available. Having used both IS136 and cdmaOne networks, I felt I was giving up a huge amount to use them, and coming back to GSM has been a joy. Just being able to have a PDA phone again (not really a great idea on a non-GSM network - if you can't leave your PDA at home without losing your connectivity, who wants such a thing?) has been fantastic.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
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
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.
Because GPRS is part of GSM.
GSM is not analog. GPRS is the high-speed data extension to GSM; for voice you still need GSM. And I'd imagine that by 2004 every GSM chipset will include GPRS.
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.
CDMA (IS-95) is NOT encrytped in the US or in any equipment exported from the US (government regulation). My company makes equipment that listens on CMDA calls every single day.
GSM is encrypted just about everywhere with varying levels of security. GSM encryption was purposly weakened by the EU so that various government entities could listen in.
Stop spreading your CMDA vs GSM FUD.
The only relevant measure of CDMA vs GSM success is subscribers 650 million (GSM) versus 125 million (IS-95).
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.
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.
Lack of personal mobility is a deployment issue, not something intrinsic to CDMA. The network operators don't want you to have the same number when you switch carriers... basically to increase the hassle of switching.
In the US, the cost of the phone is subsidized by the carrier. On the day you sign up for service with Verizon (for e.g.), Verizon spends about 100-300 dollars on you. The Motorola phone that costs 29.95 at Radio Shack probably costs $300.00 if you buy it yourself. That is why the cell-phone business model involves the lock-in period. You can blame the business model if you wish, but the fact remains that cell phones would be far less popular in this country if the user was expected to buy the phone.
As for the upgrade schedule of GSM... the next step is Wideband CDMA, which works over 5 MHz spectrum. Don't hold your breath waiting for it to arrive... the equipment is at least 2-4 years away from general availablility.
Meantime, the US version of CDMA (CDMA2000) is marching ahead. The voice part is well-entrenched. The 3G version (which works over 1.25 MHz, enabling carriers to use their existing spectrum as opposed to having to aqcquire new, continuous chunks of 5Mhz spectrum) is available today, you can buy service from Sprint and Verizon. Nortel, Lucent, Motorola and Samsung have mature Base Station implementations.
The data part of CDMA2000, 1xEVDO, will be available early next year in commercial versions. Nortel, Lucent and Samsung are trialing their implementations with different carriers as you read this. 1xEVDO provides a 2.4Mbps shared pipe over 1.25Mhz spectrum and kicks the ass of UMTS and Wideband CDMA. UMTS offers only a few hundred kilobits per second, and Wideband CDMA offers a max of 2Mbps over a 5 Mhz spectrum.
The rest of the World has already made up its mind as to what it prefers. Most carriers in North America and Asia (in particular, Korea) have decided to go with CDMA2000 as opposed to Wideband CDMA.
In short, Europe is not going to be ahead in wireless for much longer.
Magnus.
GSM is an evoloving standard which incorporates all sort of sorts of technologies. Encryption could be added, but like any standard involving multiple parties, it will take time. There will always be pluses and minuses, though I like what GSM has to offer.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
um... UMTS (not UTMS) is more like CDMA because it IS CDMA.
GSM is a TDMA (time division multiplex) protocol and UMTS is a CDMA (code division multiple access) protocol.
More information on cdma and UMTS and on GSM and TDMA.
With this chip, how long before a disposable phone? Seems to me that this is what that industry has been begging for.
But you can squese a GPRS only (no voice) network into the very small frequency bands available in the USA. Can't do GSM voice as teh inter cell interference is too high, but you can just about manage it with Coding Scheme 1 in GPRS. Your throughput will only be around 9kbps, but if you want faster write to the FCC and ask for more spectrum.
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?)
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
A GSM user can use the same account with as many phones as they wish, switching from one to another in the time it takes to remove the SIM from one phone and slot it in another. That's why most smartphones are GSM - because, frankly, anyone using a smartphone on a cdmaOne network (or, god forbid, a D-AMPS one) will find they're stuck with having to use that phone for all their usage associated with that number. Not many people in their right minds would do such things, and hence not many cdmaOne users have smartphones.
As for the rest of your comments, UMTS is a multiple air-interface system, one of whose technologies is WCDMA. If Qualcomm doesn't actively push WCDMA, and currently it's trying to diss it, it'll find it's without patent revenue from the vast majority of operators worldwide, because UTMS operators will simply use EDGE or other interfaces. cdma2000, in the meantime, badly needs basic additional functionality, such as personal mobility, if equipment providers and network operators are to recoup anything substantially above what they get from existing voice networks. Data networks are no-go without personal mobility. It's time Qualcomm woke up and realised that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
According to this GSM World article, security is not much of a problem any more. "A new security algorithm, known as A5/3, will provide users of GSM mobile phones with an even higher level of protection against eavesdropping than they have already. It will ensure that even if a prospective attacker manages to pull a GSM phone call out of the radio waves, he will be completely unable to make sense of it, even if he throws massive computing resources at the task.
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.
UMTS is the next generation GSM standard. It offers a choice between multiple air interface technologies. UMTS is NOT the cdmaOne standard. It includes a CDMA based air interface standard, but this is as related to cdmaOne as an airplane is related to a balloon. Standards and protocols matter.
GSM offers one air interface technology, TDMA. It is not, however, the IS-136/D-AMPS standard, the so-called "TDMA" standard of the USA. GSM is about as related to IS-136/D-AMPS/"TDMA" as an airplane is to a balloon. Standards and protocols matter.
UMTS, and GSM, offer personal mobility, a global number space, ISDN connectivity, and system level network features. cdmaOne, the so-called "CDMA" standard, or IS-95, does not. Period. It sucks. Neither, from what I recall, does cdma2000.
Any questions?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
GPRS is for data such as WAP. You still need something like GSM for voice.
I suspect you are thinking of cracking the SIMs (the smartcard used to give a mobile its phone number) - if you have physical possession of the SIM you can clone it quite quickly - but only for those GSM companies daft enough to use an implementation of the A3/A8 algorithms which was only intended for demonstration use. (A3 and A8 are placeholders - it's up to the operator to select which algorithms will be used to implement them).
Again, can you substantiate that? I find it very difficult to believe, partly on technical grounds, and because even if the signals were in the clear, this would be very unproductive as compared with hacking the wetware.A GSM user can use the same account with as many phones as they wish, switching from one to another in the time it takes to remove the SIM from one phone and slot it in another. That's why most smartphones are GSM - because, frankly, anyone using a smartphone on a cdmaOne network (or, god forbid, a D-AMPS one) will find they're stuck with having to use that phone for all their usage associated with that number.
Actually CDMAOne does have the capability. Its just not used in North America. But it is manditory for all CDMAOne phones in China to have the account information stored on the R-UIM card. The R-UIM card is almost exactly the same as the GSM SIM card. The only difference is the name and the CDMA specific file structure. I have R-UIM cards with both the GSM and CDMA file structure on them, so they can be used in GSM and CDMA phones.
This is mainly a provider issue and not a lacking of the CDMAOne or IS-2000 standard. If you want look at http://www.3gpp2.com/Public_html/specs/CS0023-0.p
For the relivant standards on the R-UIM card, you'll see that for the most part it points at the GSM standards for how to use the card.
www.3gpp2.com is a good site to look at the standards for IS-2000 and what features are there. I don't know of any of the features you've listed that aren't already in the standards, its just that the providers aren't using them.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
In theory you could use VoIP, but it would be an expensive way of doing the job worse than GSM (e.g. you'd lose echo cancellation). Also most networks don't yet allocate dedicated bandwidth to it, so while I've used it for streaming video, I've had to put up with the odd jerky patch.
BTW, someone else seemed to think GPRS was high-speed circuit-switched - that's HSCSD, basically GSM with some of the error correction turned down, and with potentially more than one time slot allocated.
GSM doesn't do that. Simplifying a bit: a handset only communicated with the network when it's switched on, or when it moves between large areas (containing hundreds of base stations), or after a timeout of a few hours. The network needs to know roughly where it is to start incoming calls, but then it broadcasts a "wake-up" call from all of the base stations in the area. When that happens, the phone contacts a base station to pick up the call, and at that point the network knows exactly where it is.Wow, that must make for a REALLY small phone. How the hell are we supposed to dial?! :)
I have a SonyEricsson T68 (not a t68i, but it would be if I got the firmware upgrade). My phone is tri-band GSM, which means it will work no matter what country I'm in so long as they have a GSM phone network.
However, the t68 (which is probably the nicest phone I've seen to date) is not exactly cheap.
Now whether *this* chop is tri-band is another question, but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't.
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
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.
I can get 56Kbps via GPRS, I wouldn't exactly call that 'such as WAP'.
On the other hand, at the rates they want to charge for it the only thing you want to transmit with it is WAP, $0.03/K ain't cheap!
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.
In Italy, price per K is 0.006/k, that is 0.6 Euro Cents per K. Still, I would not download images on theis connection. Waiting for IMAP instead of POP in mozilla (creening off topic here..)
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.
As I said, GPRS is for data such as WAP. Data being the clue of what it's for and WAP being an example.
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
GPRS is not exactly high-speed. Theoretically it's up to 115kbps but in practice it's no better than POTS modem. GPRS is a packet-based protocol on top of GSM and means a much more economical usage of bandwidth (compared to GSM data and POTS modem, which use the entire band regardless of actual data transmission).
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
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....
The features you're describing may be part of cdma2000, I don't know. I certainly hope so. But cdmaOne, the name given to the existing 2G standard whether over cellular (IS-95) or PCS bands it definitely doesn't apply to. China may be using some CDMA based standard loosely related to IS-95, but it isn't cdmaOne if it has SIMs. I'm a tad surprised, I recall China playing a long dance with Qualcomm and then rejecting their technology. I assume the modifications were necessary to have them reconsider.
I can live in hope. If cdma2000 supports and requires implementation of these features, then it'll be on a par with UMTS and be worth looking at. If it makes all of these features optional, then the existing cdmaOne operators, who have generally been more interested in compatability with AMPS and fractionally higher capacity than providing customers with decent features, are likely to screw it up enough for other operators to decide to avoid it for an apparently limited feature set.
If cdma2000 has made it optional incidentally, then they're destroying a second major feature incidentally: roaming.
Ultimately I'm interested in the features. I must have personal mobility. I'm not keen on buying hardware for one "standard" and finding that the majority of operators on that standard will refuse to allow me access to their network with it. But I guess with ATT, Cingular, and Voicestream all on GSM or migrating to it, and all likely to adopt UMTS, at least I have a guarantee that even in the US I'll still have that choice.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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?