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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 same "open competition" which made the US completely incompatible with the rest of the world in 2G mobiles? (VoiceStream and GSM1900mhz excluded, of course).
It's a shame, though, that European companies are all license-bound to implement W-CDMA2000, rather than the plain-Jane CDMA.
The cool thing about GSM is that it's popular and lets you do 1 key thing that TDMA dose not.
Most GSM phones use identical simm cards to store configuration data, phone numbers etc...
This means that to switch a simm card from phone A to phone B makes phone B your phone. It allso means that you can comfortably switch phones betwean trusted parties the way we have switched motorviehcles for years now.
I.e. I carry the Panasonic GD35 to field work. I cary the Nokia 6210 to the Office or sales meatings and I use the Panasonic GD92 as my "Dress Phone". (It matches my silver jewelry and Titanium rimed glasses )
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
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.
I don't see it. Europe and Japan have higher population densities and smaller administrative areas, so can economically have much higher densities of cells for a given area. Handsets can't get much smaller before they start to have interface problems, so competition is on features. In the US, unless someone is willing to provide a major-metro-area-only service, handsets are going to need much more power, hence larger batteries, and less room for technological extras, before handsets get too larger.
Also, I'm unimpressed with the rhetoric in this article. He basks in schadenfreude because something his rivals claimed to be unworkable did actually work, then turns around and says what they want to do is unworkable. But he's absolutely right that the European approach of homogenization by diktat from Brussels is bound to fail, particularly after the windfall taxes imposed on the telcos by the governments, disguised as the 3G license fee.
The worst thing about discussing cell phone technologies is how hung-up everyone gets about 'Who's got the best?' and 'Who is the winner?'
That, combined with national pride (the US invented CDMA therefore it must the best), has landed the entire US cell phone industry in terrible trouble. There are four competing standards:
CDMA
TDMA
GSM
&
Nextel propreitary Motorola solution (boy, I wonder if the guy who chose that still has a job!)
What does four competing standards mean? It means there can be no meaningful consolidation in the US market, which in turn means that it is very hard to take cost out of the business. That's why the stock prices (and debt prices) for US wireless carriers have been hit so.
The most important things to decide when choosing a 3G technology should be interopability and technical feasibility. Right now, WCDMA (Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens) and CDMA2000 (Qualcomm and Samsung) seem to win in the first and second respectively.
That pride, and an obsession with 'winning' is getting in the way of a single global standard (which would mean MORE competition, not less - and if you don't believe me, look at Europe's mobile phone market) is an absolute disgrace.
Just my 2c's worth.
Robert
(A few irritations with the article: 'the addition of SIM cards made mobile phone theft a growth industry' - hmmm, like there isn't mobile phone theft and cloning in the US under CDMA; and no mention of the fact the CDMA had no support for international roaming. Grrrr. Please, don't get religious about mobile phone standards. Please.)
--- My dad's political betting
My mates in Japan email me from their mobiles... none of my other friends around the world do that. I know they probably can - it just hasn't reached the critical mass this sort of thing needs to be popular.
They also send each other photos, download maps, download restaurant reviews, and play games. Frankly I'm jealous. I live in Hong Kong so we normally get this sort of thing pretty quickly, but not this.
Sure I can see the U.S. is maybe primed to overtake Europe, there was an article related to this in the Economist last week too (premium content though - can't link to it) but Japan?
All generalisations are wrong... including this one.
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm ?story_id=1353050
To summarize the summary, Europe's TDMA has the tiny problem of basically being a broken piece of crap, while CDMA2000 actually works. This has been beautifully illustrated in Japan, where Docomo's TDMA network has been a miserable flop, while KDDI's CDMA2000-1X is booming. (Although I'll admit that KDDI's pricing is also a bit more sane.) Couple that with European governments kneecapping their operators with insane 3G license fees, causing immense financial problems right now, and the result is that European telecoms are going to fall off a cliff very soon.
And oh -- contrary to what the Slashdot brief claims, Den Beste's article says nothing about Japan having problems; quite the contrary, KDDI's network is the first successful 3G network on the planet. NTT Docomo is admittedly running into a brick wall, but that's only one operator's problem. The US, while it seems to have gotten the technology right for once (about time!), is still stuck with severe frequency allocation problems, a plethora of incompatible operators and generally a more cellular-hostile culture due to inanities like having to pay for received calls; my 5 is that Japan is the only country that's going to come out a winner from all this.
Cheers,
-j.
Another reason for Europe's efforts to have GSM the sole format in the continent was because of aging infrastructure. Many countries such as Italy have decided that it is more feasible to go wireless than to take on the expensive process of laying more cable. Also, by laying cable, you damage the beauty of some of the oldest cities by digging up the ground or erecting above-ground lines.
In North America, our cities are young, and they were designed with having data lines in them. Also, our cities are not as cramped as some of the older cities in Europe.
When North America was experimenting with cell phone technology, Europe was trying to embrace it as a means of alleviating their communication dilemma. This is why Europe pushed so hard at establishing the GSM standard for the continent.
Instant Karma's gonna get you - John Lennon
This guy really knows how to waste time, have a look at his posts in comp.os.os2.advocacy in the mid '90's. He will find some poor group and whack them over and over until they submit to his will for no reason other than to boost his ego.
In most European countries the 3G spectrum was auctioned. If the license fees are exorbitant, then the only ones to blame are the participants in the auction.
The telcos were trapped between a rock and a hard place. Fail to win a licence and the stock market would kill you quickly, win one and your own debts would kill you slowly. They all opted for the slow death hoping that they had bought enough time to figure something out.
The telcos have noone to blame but themselves for their problems, and I am sick that one after the other they're asking for government bailouts. Why the heck did we privatise them in the first place if we end up paying for their mistakes anyway?
The fault is the government's, because it did not structure the process to get citizens the best possible service, but to maximize revenue for itself. A better solution would have been a competitive tender or "beauty contest", in which the best technical and economic solutions, indepenently assessed, won. The only winners were the government treasuries, and their appetites are insatiable.
They wouldn't have needed a "bail out" if they were free to do business, but as it is, they are strangled by over-regulation out of Brussels and taxation at home. Privatization is pointless if the private owners aren't free to run the company as they see fit without interference.
That is, the fact that you pay to receive calls. How on earth did you get there and why do you accept it? Sure, you could argue that you pay for the privilidge of people being able to connect you - but as far as I'm concerned, if someone calls me, they should foot the bill because they are the one that is doing the contacting. It's worked with fixed line long enough, why should it be the other way around.
So, can someone please enlighten me? In the UK we can give our mobile number out to anyone because it'll cost them to call us. If we adopted the US style of billing, I'd be utterly loath to give my number out to anyone who didn't absolutely need it.
I've also got friends who'd phone up and ramble on for hours. If we shifted billing patterns I'd end up saying "listen mate, i know [blah] but this is costing me a bleeding fortune". If they want to talk for hours, let them pay.
Really (and I'm not trolling here) is there any decent benefits to this billing method? The best I can come up with is that it's free to phone your mates and talk for hours because the poor sods foot the bill. But I can't really see any other particular advantages.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Everyone is missing what is actually happening in the market. A while back I gave a talk about this and said that 3G is basically dead. In the US and the world. Why? WiFi. The problem that 3G has is that it attempts to be everything to everyone. WiFi not. In 98 a study was done in Berlin on student behaviour and wireless. What did they find out? Students want hot spot wireless.
This means when they sit down for a coffee they will want access to the Internet. When they sit down in the library they will want wireless. But when people are walking around they only want voice wireless. In other words Internet wireless is a hotspot type technology. You will want it at home, at the airport, on the train, in the office at StarBucks.
3G cannot compete with this since creating hotspot areas are much cheaper and faster. While 3G braggs about 1 MBit, Wifi is already at 11Mbits and moving up.
Sorry folks, 3G is dead! Unless of course 3G is as cheap as Wifi, then 3G will survive. But that would mean somehow somewhere the telcos are going to have to figure out how to make 3G cheap.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
One point that seems to be ignored in this article is integrated USE out of the technology.
e r-to-do-calculations
Consider: the US (if he's right) may have the best phone system in the world (in a few years)
But: in Europe, people have been actually USING a working phone system for several years.
One thing I found amazing when I moved to Britian a year ago was how cheap the phones were (compared to cost-of-living, anyway) and how much a part of the culture they are now. Heck, you see twelve-year-olds with phones now, never mind teenagers (which ALL have them). Text messaging is commonplace and somewhat reminicent of early (read: poor) email use. The social use of phones is quite astonishing.
The problem is: the US might develop a killer phone system, but only a few rich elites ever use it. This is not useful.
Hell, who CARES how much better the phones get? The networks in densely populated urban areas work just fine with very high use loads, I can make out what people are saying, and I can write short messages. The camera options may turn out to be neat, but I suspect that they won't be used very much. So, why bother to build a next-generation network?
---Nathaniel, non-luddite-but-occassionally-uses-pencil-and-pap
In my opinion the telcos were not trapped between a rock and a hard place, because they all faced the same problem. Therefore if they had been run with anything resembling business sense, they would have known what the maximum viable bid for a license was, and moreover, what the maximum viable bid was for their competitors.
This was a classic case of how not to play Prisoners Dilemma.
Of course, the main problem was that the execs and the stock market overestimated the potential profits.
Still, I agree with you that the governments screwed up the privatisation. I would have liked to see them privatise the telcos but hold on to the infrastructure, instead of giving over the infrastructure to the newly-privatised telco. After all, what's the use in replacing a government monopoly with a private one?
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The spectrum writeoffs you say will never happen have already begun happening. European wireless providers are *hurting*. If you read the article, many of them have already been requesting that they be allowed to implement CDMA2000 instead of W-CDMA.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I was a field radio repairman is the US Army Signal Corp serving in Viet Nam around 1970-71 and as someone who was qualified to work on every model then in use I can tell you that there was NO spread spectrum technology deployed at that time. The latest things then were a single side band set and "modular" plugin components which were nothing more than circuit boards in metal cases incorporating some small scale ICs inside. I was also trained along side National Guardsmen on sets still in use by the NG using vacuum tubes.
I did not closely track advances in radio technology after that since I was more interested in software but I can well believe that spread spectrum technology in general and CDMA in particular were considered revolutionary when pioneered. I have seen other reports of CDMA controversy that are consistent with the account given by Steven Den Beste.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
If this is the case, what incentive does the rest of the world have to take up your standard? Their cute little GSM phones will work fine for them. If you're right, though, GSM won't take off in the US, so your standard will at least prevail on your own turf.
I wouldn't count on it, though. I'm Australian. You think the US is sparsely populated? Australia has a population similar to that of New York, only it's spread over a continent. And we're pretty happy with GSM: most Aussies I know who've been to the US were unimpressed with the mobile phone system there.
It is a woman's prerogative to change other people's minds.
I have a CDMA phone in the US. I used to use it on Sprint. I went to another carrier that also uses CDMA, but I couldn't use the phone! Why? Because Sprint refused to release the unlock codes for the phone!
IOW, the technical standards aren't enough for a successful system. The carriers also need to realize that their current business practices are retarding the development of good cellular services in the US. In order to reduce churn (people moving from one system to another), they intentionally throw up compatibility problems - such as I described above. They *like* the fact that I have to buy a new phone to use one of their competitors. I currently have contracts with four cellular companies, and every one requires a different phone! This is *not* really a technical issue, as some of those phones operate in 3 different modes!
Then there is the issue of roaming. Does anyone imagine that roaming in the US is anything other than a method to seriously soak the traveler? Of course, if you have the "right" plan, and you roam to your own carriers' network (a couple of exceptions apply), you don't pay the huge roaming charges (often 60-90 cents per minute). If you travel to rural areas (as I do when tornado chasing), this is a huge issue.
The free market in the US did indeed allow the best technology to evolve, and the anti-free market posts in this discussion seem to be ideologically driven rather than fact driven in this regard.
Unfortunately, that market has so far produced an inferior business model where the phones don't operate across multiple systems; where advanced services (such as messaging) likewise are proprietary; where vendors strive for unique (incompatible) services in order to take market share; where there is great waste as each of a number of providers has to provision the same geographical area.
Overall, my take is that the US has used the power of the free market to allow the best technology to be proven, to the advantage of the rest of the world and at great cost to America!
The only good weather is bad weather.
I am tired of all the whining about "qualcomm tax". For almost 10 years they toiled in obscurity while naysayers and Euro government subsidized luddite-behemoths like Ericsson & Nokia spent millions poisoning the field ("CDMA is hype", "CDMA can't work because it defies the laws of physics", "We tried CDMA and it was all BS", "Actually we own all the patents on CDMA, so qualcomm can't possibly make it work"). Now that CDMA has been made to work successfully the Ericcsons, Alcatels, Nokias shamelessly want to pile on. their only "innovations" in the intervening years being coming up with superficial crap like ringtones, faceplates and the other lightweight protocol junk that differentiates GSM from TDMA. the euro-cabal has never had any history of fundamental innovations like the Asians or Qualcomm.
the euro cabal + motorola requires royalties of 25+% for GSM handsets, which is the main reason that the Asians have been shut out of the GSM handset market. Qualcomm quite stupidly is licensing its patents at between 2 to 8%, when it fact good survival tacts suggest it should be charging the GSM Euro-cabal, the same 25% the Euro-Cabal levies on others. In any case European users have been toilet-trained into accepting extortionate prices by the Euro-cabal. they won't notice the additional 25% cost on UMTS handsets.
finally a lot of spec-reading experts are comparing GPRS to CDMA 1x. perhaps they can point to a real world location where GPRS througput exceeds 40kbps. the reality is that no carrier can afford to dedicate timeslots to this miserable beast. OTOH there are many real world locations where 1x exceeds 80kbps and a few (S Korea) where it often exceeds 110kbps.
I used *works* in a slightly broader sense, as in a good system that's *widely deployed* and *non-vaporware*.
I have in my hand a CDMA phone that works. It's upward compatible with CDMA2000, which has been deployed, and working today. You're supporting the European standard UMTS, which is W-CDMA based, and hasn't been proven to work.
The Economist points out that there are 2.3 million customers for CDMA2000 in Japan, compared to 135 thousand for UMTS.
I have no problems whatsover with the EU lengthening the technical generations a bit. It's better for interoperability, creates a bigger market, and avoids vendor lock-in.
The problem is, the EU is doing this by specifying a winner. They anoint a standard, and then everyone goes back to there own companies, and see if they can make it work. In the case of UMTS, the answer seems to be "no", or at least "not yet".
In the US, on the other hand, new technologies are rolled out when the service providers deem the technology is mature enough for it to work. Several competing technologies can be tried at once, and the winner can be used as the base of the next generation designs.
Does this lead to lock in to carriers? Yes, to some extent. The contracts that carriers force people to sign is probably more effective than the technological barriers.
The idea that the EU will use GSM till eternity is as stupid as saying that the US will universally adopt CDMA2K, and that is the last mobile technology ever to be invented.
I think nothing of the sort. The problem is, the EU is picking a winner that isn't. The Economist points out the the telecom carriers there are having problems with the technology, and that's stopping 3G deployment in the EU. In the US, 3G is already out (CDMA2K). And if UMTS winds up being the better system in the long run, providers can adopt it instead, without the FCC revoking their license.
This guy's thesis is obviously bullshit; too bad he couldn't at least get his facts straight.
WCDMA is the future. Everyone recognizes that technically, UMTS/WCDMA is a much better standard than Qualcomm-patented CDMA2000. And to further bury Qualcomm's last futile attempt to extract royalties from the cellular world, Nokia recently demonstrated a dual-band GSM/WCDMA phone; this phone was able to cross over from a WCDMA network to a GSM one, and continue on the same call, without a blink.
Verizon, the largest company in the US which is controlled by Vodafone, is switching to WCDMA. So is T-Mobile, Cingular, ATTWS, and probably Nextel if they're still around by then. Only Sprint has committed itself to CDMA2000 - and Sprint, at #4, is rapidly becoming as insignificant as Nextel.
The author is right that CDMA-based technologies are better than TDMA. But supporting CMDA2000, doomed from the start, shows him to be nothing more than someone who's really jealous that Europe actually knows what they're doing in regards to cellular, and that they'll have WCDMA networks well before the US. To which I say: too bad.