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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 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
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'?