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CDMA, Cell Phone Standards And Who "Wins"
Fubar writes "Former Qualcomm engineer Steven Den Beste, Captain of the USS Clueless outlines why he thinks the US is primed to overtake Europe and Japan as the technological leader in cell phone technology. He argues it stems from open competition and the use of CDMA."
The phrase "widely optimistic" comes to mind. "Open", this would be describing CDMA v GSM how ? GSM is used in Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia, Australia, and now in large parts of the US. Competition is between a large number of international firms based around the globe in a number of different countries and competing in vastly different markets with differing pressures.
CDMA, US and what is it, one other country. Companies almost exclusively based in the US.
Maybe Japan and Europe will lose the current massive advantage they have in Mobile technology, its possible, after all the US is only 2 years or so behind Europe which is 2 years behind Japan.
And anyone who thinks that doing CDMA helps WCDMA is living in the clouds. Who are the large phone companies in the US, Vodaphone, T-Mobile any one ? And who owns them.... What are the most popular handsets ?
Companies in the US will survive but don't except them to thrive, unless of course protectionism comes in to prevent fair competition.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
that's where Qualcomm makes its millions: from Patents involving CDMA. What else is he going to say?
That's like asking a Republican for an interview, and reporting as news that he thinks Republicans will win the Senate in the elections. What else is he going to say?
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
For the end-user what matters is what works NOW. I have travelled all over Europe, also in China, Malesia, Jamaica and even Cuba without having to loose my lifeline to the rest of the world, switch SIM-cards or handsets or actually do anything out of the ordinary. It works just like it would work at home. But I still cannot use my cellphone at JFK or Newark airport, for example. Call that progress?
- mipe -
i'm missing the 4 little lettes of "UMTS" the next "dictated" cellphone network in the EU (and japan)slated for an 2004/05 rollout (which seems to be FAR superior to the CDMA stuff described).
;)
Anyhow, for me the article is highly subjective "go america"-babble.
just one thing, i just remembered another article which stated most US-cellphone owners dont/didn't even know about the nice little SMS feature that has become somewhat of a way-of-life for some in europe. So they carry around an extra pager, just because the incompatible cell-networks prevented free exchange of sms-messages though cellphones.
belive what you will, i believe what i want
He argues it stems from open competition
Oh yeah? Is that the same open competition that kept the US with three or four different and incompatable air interface technologies while the rest of the world got on with implementing GSM? Yeah, thats worked well for the US in the past, no reason it can't continue to work in the future...
and the use of CDMA
Why? "Plain" CDMA is technically only slightly better than GSM, and then only in certain conditions. Don't even bother trying to claim that the current CDMA technology somehow helps with the upgrade to CDMA2000 or W-CDMA; it doesn't. The current CDMA carriers have to upgrade just as much equipment as the current GSM operators.
Oh, and the European/Rest-Of-World 3G standard is UMTS. So what does CDMA have to do with the price of cell phone technology?
It seems to me that Steven Den Beste is comparing Europe's old standard (GSM) with America new-to-be standard CDMA. Why doesn't he compare it with UTMS, which is in all probability going to be the new standard in Europe?
Maybe I'm misinformed, but I find it hard to believe European phone companies will forget about the billions of euro's they invested in buying share's of the bandwidth for UTMS and say, hell, we'll write that investment off and just go for this CDMA standard. Fat chance.
---
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Honestly. I'm not trying to troll.
Read the rest of his site to get an idea of just how to portray oneself as an American bigot.
Folks like Den Beste are the reason there are big problems within American culture with regards to xeno-relations.
His recent blahblah parade about Schröder's comparison of Bush to Hitler (the comparison is fair and valid to anyone who has studied the rise of the 3rd Reich) reveals a "Patriot" who just doesn't get it.
Americans like him are the problem with America today.
This cell phone controversy is just that: controversy. America has lacked *SO FAR* behind all other Western nations when it comes to cell phone usage, it should be embarrassing.
The fact is, America's Telecom Mafia have been keeping the U.S. in the 'wheel is cool' days of cellular tech since the very beginning. That he is incapable of seeing this just belies his bigotry.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Technical superiority if no guarantee of success. Achieving critical density in the market is a much better indicator - and the US will probably carry on with a fragmented market and piss any technical advantage away.
I largely agree with you, but bear in mind that at the time of the 3G auctions in Europe, the general consensus was that a network operator without a 3G license would be dead as soon as people migrated away from GSM (then thought to be only 5 or so years away).
Having this belief, they chose to believe optimistic profit forecasts rather than drop out of the auctions and go bankrupt.
No.
Making claims like that might help to give you a warm little tingle when the discussions about U.S and European telecoms infastructure comes up, but its simply wrong.
All western European countries have perfectly fine, digital, fibre based telecoms networks. We have access to both DSL and Cable broadband technology. The U.K, for instance, switched off its last analogue telephone exchange about 5 years ago.
The wireless networks in Europe are in addition to a U.S-comparable fixed line infastructure. Sorry.
CDMA is actually deployed fully in the USA, Canada, South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia and Japan--that I know of. It's probably in many other countries too. I talked to the rep from my local CDMA company (Bell Mobility--the other CDMA company up here in Canada is Telus) and he rattled off a nice long list of countries that they have CDMA roaming agreements with.
The biggest problem with CDMA, though, is that the handsets aren't as consumer-friendly as the GSM handsets. If CDMA handsets had an equivalent of the GSM SIM chip, they'd eat GSM alive. I think that's a large part of why GSM is still kicking here--the phones are so much more hackable than the CDMA phones.
Me, I'm hedging my bets; I have a GSM handset and a CDMA handset. GSM because there's more choice available, and CDMA because it's techically superior, and it still works in analogue-only areas. If anything half as cool as KDDI's AU handsets turns up over here, my primary handset will be CDMA again.
FYI, 3G GSM (Note: GPRS is 2.5G not 3G) will be based on CDMA.
So CDMA has won. There may be multiple CDMA standards (Although it seems like things are converging for true 3G), but all of the next-gen standards will be CDMA in some form.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
That is the real point for me, I can take my Motorola Timeport to pretty much any country I want to go and use it. I can't do that with my old and bulky Qualcomm phone.
The article has a lot of good technical info but about mid way through I started to think 'I have heard this before', it really does have the flavor of the emacs/vi discussion. The basic thrust of the Qualcomm position is that it has a better upgrade path, so even if it is not as good today it will be better in the future.
The guy makes a self contradicting argument, first he says that CDMA is better, then he admits that to make it really work you have to know stuff that is not in the patents. Now I work at the level of the 'front room' guys that he was dissing and I can tell you that they could not give a rats arse as to which system is better in an engineering sense
The Qualcom engineer fully validates the point that Erickson and Nokia were making, as handset manufacturers they were disadvantaged by Qualcom's control of the CDMA technology. There is not a CTO arround who is going to allow a competitor to get that type of a stranglehold without a fight, well not a good one anyway. What the article does not mention is that Erickson only bought the CDMA license after Qualcomm had quit manufacturing - i.e. after they ceased to be a competitor.
From a consumer's point of view there is no question that the European market looks much better than the US. Cellular rates are a half or a quarter of the US prices. I could actually afford to use my pocket PC to surf the Web in Europe, in the US it would be cheaper to have my secretary print out all my email every day and fed-ex it to me.
As for the 'protectionism' jibe, don't fool yourself, the US market is just as protectionist as the EU. In some ways it is worse - wanna buy a large screen TV, well the FCC is going to require you to buy a $200 HDTV tuner with it even though you get your signal off satelite or cable. At least in the EU its the airwaves they auction, not the legislation.
As for 3G, the reason it is failing is very simple and obvious to anyone who visits Europe, they already have a cellular system that works fine and is very cheap to use. Mobile data is a far less compelling proposition than the people selling it claimed. OK it is kewl to be able to read email on the go, but only if doing so is almost no cost. That simply cannot be the case if support for data requires a whole new infrastructure to be rolled out.
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I think because the caller doesn't know what number he's calling to (cellular or normal phone). Someone could sue you for ripping him off because he had to pay extra when not knowing it was a cellular he was calling.
What mr. Den Beste writes is nonsense at best, and capitalist fundamentalism otherwise. Of course it may take a little while longer for Europe to adopt the latest whizz-bang RF layer in their mobile communication systems. But in the mean time, we've been able for *years* to use an *implemented* system that *works*. The US didn't.
And the US situation won't improve, because what he seems to forget completely is that his lovely state of uncontrolled chaos isn't ended now that his fantastic top of the bill CDMA is available for licensing. Of course CDMA adoption will still be partial, with the next better transmission system (full-spectrum wavelets?) already appearing on the horizon. Technology is always in flux, and if you're always busy implementing the latest thing, you'll never be able to actually *enjoy using something*. Artur C. Clarke has a great story where a war was lost because the generals didn't know 'best' is the enemy of 'better'.
This guy actually has the hubris to say, "we're done. We've developed the last system ever needed in mobile communications. We'll get our first CDMA handset on the market before the Europeans, so that also means our development system works best". Excellent reasoning.
Well, mr. Den Beste, I don't define the best system for mobile communications as the one having the highest capacity or the most fancy features, but as the one that enables most people to communicate while enjoying their freedom to travel from country to country and from vendor to vendor, thank you very much.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
It's the size and convenience of the network, and the cost of the calling plan. Most users could care less what technology their cell phone uses, so long as those criteria are met in the most convenient form possible.
That said, IMO CDMA is clearly a superior technology, with better scaling and more convenient data potential. Verizon's (the largest US CDMA player) network is large and pretty much nationwide with minimal gaps in coverage (most of the gaps are supported in AMPS mode, though). Sprint's network size is also pretty good in the metro areas, but without the suburban and rural coverage that Verizon gets. TDMA in the US is dead and moldering - companies can't get away from it fast enough. GSM is a growth area here, replacing "classic" TDMA and being built out new.
Despite my preference for CDMA technically, though, inside my pocket is a Motorola T193. And it's a GSM phone. Why? Not because I travel internationally - I rarely do, and when I do I don't really care about renting a phone (or using mine) and moving the SIM card. And it's not because I like GSM. I don't.
The reason I have a GSM phone is simple: T-Mobile (fr. Voicestream) had the best pricing option for two phones (my wife's and mine), and their coverage was good enough to meet my anticipated usage. Period. No other reasons. I gave up a nice StarTAC 7668 that I'd had with Verizon for the GSM phone - the StarTAC was great but the calling plan sucked.
Ultimately I think whoever wins the cell technology wars in this country will be whoever combines a reasonable per-minute price with caller-pays billing. That's what's generally missing here that many other countries do. If the company that comes out with that uses GSM, then GSM wins. The tech is irrelevant as a marketing decision, it's a behind-the-scenes thing that the consumer doesn't really care about.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Instead some facts:
- CDMA is superior to the TDMA/FDMA used by GSM (yes, it's a combination). Big deal. The GSM-standard is a lot older than IS-95.
- A mobile phone net consists of a lot more than just the air interface. One of the advantages of GSM is its close integration with the ISDN fixed network.
- With the exception of one network in Korea (IS-95) and Japan (build their own system), the whole world (or did I miss someone?) decided to go with GSM not IS-95. All because of bribery?
- Everybody agrees, that (W)CDMA is the way to go for 3G (although there were different proposals in the beginning). There's an international standardization body called 3GPP working on the specification (i.e. already finished it). The standard is called UMTS and uses WCDMA.
- Japan decided to use UMTS and take a very important part in its specification, although they don't upgrade from a GSM network.
- The UMTS standard is a new technology without legacy, while CDMA2000 has to make some compromises to be compatible to IS-95.
- Europe doesn't have to 'throw the switch' for UMTS. New spectrum has already been licensed. The old GSM network will work like before for another couple of years at least. Nokia just presented the first combined GSM/UMTS network.
- On the example of MobilCom: Yes, they may very well go bankrupt. Yes, it's probably France Telecom's fault. How this'll impact the German mobile market? Hmm, let's think. Current number of MobilCom network customers: Zero! Nope, don't think it'll be a big deal... (MobilCom was one of the 'fresh starters' for UMTS. They were generally expected to have problems or even go bankrupt)
There's so much more BS in his article, which could be invalidated easily (especially on the 'government dictated' vs. 'free market' part), it's really not worth the read.I have no doubt, that the US will eventually catch up with Europe and Japan, but I nevertheless think that the NIH-syndrom lies clearly on the side of the US. The standardization of UMTS (WCDMA) was an open process done in 3GPP. Several nations took part, like Europe, Japan, Korea, China. However the US operators decided to go with CDMA2000, because it's developed by Qualcomm...
The reason is that it costs the cell phone company the same amount of money whether you call someone or recieve a call. It uses the same bandwidth after all.
If you made the person calling pay double, what happens when they call a land line phone? Do you have different pricing depending on who you call? If I am Sprint and the person I am calling is AT&T, how does AT&T pay Sprint's bandwidth? What if AT&T's bandwidth costs more than Sprint's and Sprint has to change it's charging depending on which cell phone company you are calling?
What happens in England if a land line person calls a cell phone? Do they have to pay for the cell phone charges?
It just seems easier to bill for the total amount you talk on a cell phone--calling or recieving.
Let me know when we finally win, because right now I feel like the loser.
My brother recently went looking for a cell phone. He lives in a reasonably sized size (Madison, Wisconsin), we have several competing carriers, but service isn't perfect. Getting good coverage at home and at work is naturally essential, so he went shopping around. He inquired about various possibilies of trying a phone to test for dead zones before commiting to a two year contract. Could he just pay for a month and return the phone if dissatisfied? No. Could he take the two year contract and pay for the phone and return both for refund if dissatisfied? No. Was there any way he could try the phone for a few days and return it if dissatisfied, costing him only one or two months service? No. A key element of selecting a provider is the actual coverage you experience. Everyone has dead zones, but only you can determine if the dead zones are acceptable for you. US mobile phone providers are doing their damnest to limit proper competition by making it practically impossible for people to shop around.
Relatedly, I invested in a slightly higher end phone instead of getting the nearly free one that came with my contract. It's a nice phone, but it also represents a doorstop if I chose to change providers. Carriers refuse to support each others phones, sometimes for technical reasons, but mostly because it gives them a chance to sell me a new phone. Not willing to spend the money on the new phone? Phone, meet your owner. Owner, meet your ball and chain. I'm deeply jealous of the easy phone and provider swapping that can be done in Europe.
Meanwhile, as has been pointed out before, we're paying to receive calls. While I do understand that sending a call to my cell phone costs money, sending a call to my land line phone also costs money. The land line phone companies figured out a billing structure so that receiving a call is free. Cell phone service in many foreign countries has figured out how to only charge for making a call, not receiving one. Why isn't this the rule in the U.S. yet?
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This whole article is a self serving pile of bullshit.
This actually _is_ about Qualcomm dominance.
Qualcomm is the RAMBUS Inc. of cellular telephony. Or, to be more precise, they are the role model that RAMBUS tried to imitate, but failed. Qualcomm has successfully poisoned and mined a whole field of technology with their patents and now require everyone to pay "Qualcomm tax" who wants to be active there.
And that doesn't end with patent licenses. As the quoted author put it so well:
Isn't that great ? So Quallcomm sold them licenses with the full knowledge they wouldn't do them any good. Stupid them - why didn't they also buy Qualcomm chips and hire Qualcomm consultants ?
Now I'm asking you to take a step back and remember what the "patent" thing actually is about: Basically, you exchange full disclosure for a time limited monopoly, the idea beeing that this generally furthers innovation.
But in the world of RAMBUS and Qualcomm, Innovation is actually something that has to be prevented. Because, they have already invented something, so anybody else doing so is a threat to them. They are the perfect manifestation of the "Not Invented Here" princciple.
Technology standards exist for a reason. In some fields, lack of standards just brings you chaos and loss of quality. (We've seen that in the US in the past decade). In others, the need for a standard is so extreme, that market participants settle for a vendor standard eventually. This of course, is a huge advantage for the vendor in question, and a huge disadvantage for everyone else.
The author here essentially argues that he thinks the world is now ripe to settle on such a standard. And he is full of glee that its his company winning - after having successfully sabotaged every attempt to agree on a worldwide common standard.
Should we all share his sentiment ?
GSM is technically superior for two reasons. The first is that it is modular. You can stick a SIM card in anything that has a GSM slot - your mobile phone, your PDA, your laptop, your anything, and then that device becomes your communication tool, with your address book and account information.
I should just point out that this has little or nothing to do with GSM itself, and much to do with the phone-culture that has sprung up in Europe. If the European carriers were to adopt CDMA-2000 rather than UMTS (as they want to do), there's no reason why they could not insist on a SIM card feature being included in the phones. That would be trivial to add to a working CDMA-2000 phone, while it's pointless on a non-functional W-CDMA system.
The same goes for the arguments about pricing schemes in Europe as compared to the US. There's no reason to believe that the European pricing model will change at all, simply because they've decided to use CDMA-2000 as opposed to UMTS.
The guy is a former employee of Qualcomm, and I'm surprized that he isn't posting a negative opinion piece.
Personally I find this all hilarious: On here on Slashdot, any story regarding the US yields hundreds of posts by frothing Europeans (NOTE: For the slow, the frothing are Europeans, but not all Europeans are frothing) gloating about how superb their "technically superior" GSM is. Well it isn't technically superior. The only advantage GSM has is that it was mandated as the only acceptable standard in Europe. To any true geeks, such "superiority" would be as suspect as claiming that Windows is the superior operating system because they sell software for it at Circuit City. CDMA is, technically, superior to GSM, and as this article mentions the future direction of GSM is the abolishment of GSM: Moving to a hybrid CDMA solutions. That doesn't really say much for GSM now does it? Foolish claims of superiority because of phone implementations are just ridiculous: North Americans aren't nearly as phone centric. Yup, we have coverage pretty much continent wide, and you can pick up great little handhelds for free from most providers, yet still most people don't bother. When someone proclaims that Europe has a superiority because numerically more of the population has cell phones, again that just points out that inferiority complex bulging to get out. It's like claiming that the US is superior because more people have guns.