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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."
I am Sure That I am not the only person who would love to see an integrated cpu/memory/GPU/etc on one chip
Why would you want a pc that you couldn't upgrade the memory or video on? Or end up paying to disable what you paid for originally? What you mention would be fine for your home pc drone or specialized use (PVR comes to mind), but as a chip for the cognoscenti, I can't see it flying.
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.
Price is the big winner for manufacturers. Having a single chip solution would quickly drive the price of the phones (and other techno toys) down and facilitate the widespread move to GSM.
I assume that by "interesting possibilities" he is referring to possibly being able to imbed the chip into other types of devices cheaply (I'm thinking of having a chip in each piece of furniture that you have to assemble so it'll phone home to let the manufacturer know how big of a klutz you are and how many screws are left over).
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?)
You can take a peek into the insides of GSM phones here:
6 8/ inside_t68.html
http://www.inside-gsm.com/inside-gsm_home.html
A fairly new model is the Ericsson T68 (comes with color LCD):
http://www.inside-gsm.com/Ericsson/T68/Inside_T
jetmarc
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.
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!
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).
Now you can blame all the stupidity on a single chip.
Keep in mind that though lower energy consumption in itself is not functionally different, it paves the way for integrating other components (bigger screen, camera, GPS, Bluetooth, etc...).
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.
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.
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.
GPRS is for data such as WAP. You still need something like GSM for voice.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.