Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
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).
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?)
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!
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.
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.
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."