Slashdot Mirror
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."
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
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
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.
Uh-huh. My Japanese class just recently watched a short clip of videos from Japan. The have cell phones there with built-in cameras that you can use to see the other person you're talking to (assuming their phone supports it) or even take pictures and e-mail them.
Not only that, it's common for high schoolers to have these kinds of phones in Japan; at least where I live in America, it's strange for high schoolers to have cell phones at all. And we're poised to overtake Japan? Suuure.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
(On Screen): As I think many of my readers know, I used to work for Qualcomm designing cell phones. Qualcomm is the company which invented CDMA, and made it practical, and made it into a market success, and it now dominates the American market, where Verizon and Sprint both use it. There are two other nationwide cellular systems: AT&T currently uses IS-136 TDMA, which is obsolete and has no upgrade path. Cingular uses GSM, a more sophisticated form of TDMA from Europe.
And right now I'm basking in the evil glow of a major case of schadenfreude.
The original cell phones were analog, using fairly straightforward FM for voice communication. When your phone was in a call, it was granted a frequency by the cell and used it exclusively for the entire duration of the call. FM encoding is extremely inefficient in use of bandwidth, and spectrum was scarce and expensive, and it rapidly became clear that FM wasn't able to handle the traffic which was expected and which was really needed to make cellular telephony a profitable business. One obvious approach was to use digital communications, and to take advantage of advances in microprocessor and digital IC technology to compress the voice traffic going both directions, and thus you saw deployment of the first Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) digital systems. What they do is to take a single channel and timeshare it among several phones, who digitize and compress their voice traffic and transceive it during their timeslice. With IS-136, a 30 KHz channel which had carried only one voice call with AMPS could now carry three digitized calls.
GSM went further than that, and abandoned the old channel size entirely. It allocated 200 KHz channels and divided them into 8 slices, giving each phone somewhat less than 25 KHz effective bandwidth. (There are some losses due to time guardbands and protocol overhead.)
GSM also included a very powerful set of features above that, and included some interesting features not directly associated with the RF link, such as a personality module which contained a customer's phone number and billing information that could be moved to another phone any time the customer wished to. (That particular featured turned out to be a decidedly mixed blessing. While that ability was very convenient for legitimate customers, it was also a magnet for thieves and frauds.)
GSM was clearly superior to IS-136 or such abortions as IDEN (a Motorola design which never became an industry standard because Moto was never willing to license it, which meant that systems which adopted it could only get infrastructure and handsets from Motorola).
In Europe, various governments decided that they (the Europeans) had designed the ultimate digital cellular system, and they passed laws making it illegal to deploy anything except GSM, whose primary supporters/suppliers were Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens and Alcatel.
Meanwhile, the FCC decided that it would not mandate any industry standard. It granted licenses for spectrum but permitted the licensee to choose whatever equipment and standard it wanted. (Within limits. There were certain certification standards required by the FCC to guarantee safety and to avoid interference between neighboring systems.)
And all through the 90's, me and everyone else in the US cell phone industry put up with constant ragging from Europeans about the evident virtues of GSM and the equally evident virtues of a government mandated standard. While in the US you had what seemed at the time to be utter chaos, with a huge number of small companies using a bewildering array of different standards, in Europe anyone could carry their phone almost anywhere in the continent, and if they couldn't use it they could move their personality module into a local phone and use that.
Of course, that apparent chaos in the US was only a temporary phenomenon, and I think maybe the FCC and the rest of the government knew it would be. There's always shakeout, but in the meantime this kind of government policy of keeping hands off meant that the industry was given broad ability to experiment. And within that environment, early in the 1990's, the founders of my former employer Qualcomm began to work on a radically different way to handle cell phones called Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA. It's radical in many, many ways but by far the most obvious is that all the phones in the system and all the cells in the system operate simultaneously on the same carrier frequency. They don't "take turns" because they don't need to.
In the computer industry we talk about the "ISO seven layer model", where the process of communication is modularized and each layer uses the one below it without worrying how the lower layer actually works. TCP works whether the physical layer is 802.11b or ethernet or something else entirely, and TCP itself doesn't change based on that. TCP uses IP, and IP uses the datalink layer, and the problems of the physical layer are dealt with by the datalink layer. But if the physical layer is a 56 KBaud modem, then there are things which won't be possible, which might be possible with 100 megabit ethernet. No amount of work at higher levels can compensate for the fundamental superiority of ethernet over a telephone modem.
Cell phone protocols do the same kind of thing. There's an RF layer and protocols above that, some of which can be very high level and quite abstract, such as the one which controls sending of text messages. However, the change from analog to TDMA was a change at the RF layer. CDMA was yet another approach to the RF layer, which was radically different again. (IS-95 is a specification for a complete protocol stack which includes CDMA as its RF layer.)
In fact, CDMA was so revolutionary that when it was first discussed, many thought it couldn't be made to work. Indeed, at least one European company deeply involved with GSM, Ericsson, went through the three classic stages of Not Invented Here syndrome:
1. It's impossible.
2. It's infeasible.
3. Actually, we thought of it first.
When I worked for Qualcomm, I had to soft pedal this. Now I'm no longer associated with the company, and I can vent about those idiots. At first, the most vocal top brains at Ericsson tried to claim that CDMA violated information theory.
In IS-95 CDMA, a single carrier frequency has a bandwidth of 1.2288 MHz, and up to 40 cell phones in a given sector can all be transmitting chips at that rate on the same carrier frequency, which seemed on first examination to assume that it was possible to send fifty million bits through a one-and-a-quarter MHz band, which would indeed violate Shannon. The mistake they made was that chips aren't "information" based on Shannon's definition, and though those phones were sending chips that fast, they were actually sending bits (real data) at no more than 14,400 bits per second each. (I'll try not to get too bogged down in technical details here, but to some extent it's unavoidable.)
Unfortunately, Qualcomm did a field test in New York City where several prototype phones mounted in vans were able to operate at once on the same frequency talking to multiple cells all of which also operated on the same frequency.
The next argument was that though it seemed technically possible, it would be too expensive. Everyone knew that the electronics required to make CDMA work was a lot more complicated than what TDMA used, and Ericsson's loud voices claimed that it could never be reduced in price enough to make it competitive. And shortly thereafter Qualcomm proved that wrong, too, by beginning to produce both infrastructure and phones at very competitive prices. (Qualcomm did this to bootstrap the industry. It's no longer in either business.)
After which Ericsson suddenly decided that it had applicable patents and took Qualcomm to court. Over the long drawn out process of litigation, every single preliminary court judgment went in favor of Qualcomm, and it became obvious that Ericsson didn't have a case and that Qualcomm wasn't going to be intimidated. Ultimately, the entire case was settled in a massive omnibus agreement where Ericsson became the last of the large companies in the industry to license Qualcomm's patents (on the same royalty terms as everyone else) while taking a large money-losing division off Qualcomm's hands and assuming all the liabilities associated with it, and granting Qualcomm a full license for GSM technology. The industry consensus was that this represented a fullscale surrender by Ericsson.
Nokia wasn't anything like as foolish and had licensed several years before. (Just in passing, the fools at Ericsson are in the front office. Their engineers are as good as anyone else's.)
Still, in the years of apparent chaos in the US, when loud voices in Europe proclaimed the clear advantage of a single continental standard, order began to appear out of the chaos here. Small companies using the same standards set up roaming agreements, and then started merging into larger companies, which merged into yet larger ones. One company (Sprint) started from scratch to build nationwide coverage. Bell Atlantic Mobile acquired GTE Mobile (who had been a joint partner in PrimeCo), and eventually merged with Airtouch to form Verizon, all of which was based on IS-95 CDMA, mostly on 800 MHz. Sprint eventually implemented a reasonable nationwide system also based on CDMA. The last major nationwide system to form was Cingular, after the various GSM carriers in the US realized they were in big trouble competing against Verizon and Sprint and AT&T (which uses IS-136).
Once the existence and commercial feasibility of CDMA were established beyond doubt, other aspects of it began to become clear. At the RF layer, CDMA was obviously drastically superior to any kind of TDMA. For one thing, in any cellular system which had three or more cells, CDMA could carry far more traffic within a given allocation of spectrum than any form of TDMA. (Depending on the physical circumstances, it's usually three times as much but it can be as much as five times.) For another, CDMA was designed from the very beginning to dynamically allocate spectrum.
In TDMA, a given phone in a given voice call is allocated a certain fixed amount of bandwidth whether it needs it or not. In IS-136 that's a bit less than 10 KHz, in GSM it's somewhat less than 25 KHz. (Going each direction; the total is twice that.) But humans don't use bandwidth that way; when you're talking, I'm mostly listening. So your 25 KHz channel to me is carrying your voice, and my 25 KHz channel to you is carrying the sound of me listening to you silently.
In CDMA, the amount of bandwidth that a given phone uses changes 50 times per second, and can vary over a scale of 8:1. When I'm silent, I'm only use 1/8th of the peak bandwidth I use when I'm talking. (But I don't actually send full rate most of the time even when I'm speaking.) That's very useful for voice but it's essential for data which tends to be extremely bursty, and CDMA was born able to do this. It's always had that capability. It's also always had the ability for different phones to be given different overall allocations of bandwidth, because the initial standard included both 8K and 13K codecs (which respectively use 9600 baud and 14,400 baud). So when higher data rates were desired, it was possible to augment the cell and create new cell phones which could transmit 56 kilobits per second using the same frequency as existing handsets.
When GSM wanted to do that (send data at a rate faster than the existing voice channel supported), they ended up having to allocate an entirely new carrier just for that job, which handled nothing except data, and to deploy entirely new infrastructure for it. The resulting system is called GPRS, and in many ways it turned out to be very unsatisfactory for the operating companies because it's really expensive to deploy and because it cuts down on the bandwidth they have available for voice. A given chunk of spectrum must be permanently assigned to one or the other; it can't be reallocated dynamically. Data and voice in CDMA, on the other hand, both use the same carrier and bandwidth is reallocated between the two 50 times per second automatically, and you can implement high speed data without having to install new transmitters in all the cells.
With the push to greater and greater data rates, everyone recognized that a new generation of cellular equipment would be needed, the legendary 3G.
And for the reasons given above, and several others, it was equally clear that it had to use a CDMA air interface. GSM was the very best propeller-driven fighter money could buy, but CDMA was a jet engine, and ultimately TDMA could not compete. The fundamental weakness of TDMA at the RF layer could not be compensated for at any layer higher than that, no matter how well designed it was. GSM/TDMA was a dead end, and to create 3G, Europe's electronics companies were going to have to swallow their pride and admit that Qualcomm had been right all along.
This article in the Economist says that it's not going well. When Qualcomm and its partners designed a new 3G system with new capabilities, they were able to make it backward compatible with IS-95. The new standard is called CDMA 2000, and a CDMA2K handset can work with IS-95 infrastructure, and an IS-95 handset can work with CDMA2K infrastructure, and CDMA2K cells can sit next to IS-95 cells and use the same frequencies. Thus existing operating companies using IS-95 can upgrade incrementally replacing individual cells as budget allows and selling new handsets without having to wholesale replace all existing ones at once. Most important of all, it means that you can take an existing system using an existing spectrum license, and phase it over without acquiring any new spectrum.
None of that is true for GSM. CDMA and TDMA are fundamentally incompatible and there's no way to create a new system (which they're calling WCDMA) which can support existing TDMA handsets. It's technically impossible for the new standard to be backward compatible. Worse is that there's no easy way to phase existing spectrum over. In practice, when WCDMA appears, existing GSM systems will have to install it all, issue new handsets to all customers, and then one day throw a switch -- or else they'll have to license new spectrum for WCDMA while continuing to run GSM on the existing spectrum for legacy customers. It's all going to be very ugly when it happens. (Note: It is possible to design new WCDMA handsets so that they are capable of working with old GSM/TDMA infrastructure, but it adds substantially to the cost of the unit. It is not possible at all to make WCDMA infrastructure work with GSM/TDMA handsets.)
If it happens, for the other thing they're discovering over across the pond is that making CDMA work is a lot harder than they thought it was. They're having technical problems. This article talks about the experience that DoVoMo had in Japan when it deployed the first WCDMA system in the world. It doesn't mention that DoCoMo has had to recall and replace thousands of handsets at its own expense when it was discovered that the handsets had fatal technical problems which could not be fixed. (In fact, DoCoMo had to do this twice. Both times were fantastically expensive, and both times represented really bad public relations fiascos. DoCoMo's name is mud in Japan now; they may never fully recover.)
CDMA2K, on the other hand, is real and it works now. Commercial shipments of infrastructure and handsets began a long time ago. Both Sprint and Verizon began their conversion process more than a year ago, and it's been deployed elsewhere in the world (such a by DoCoMo's rival KDDI) and what everyone is discovering is that it works. The transition is clean. There haven't been any unfortunate surprises.
And it works pretty damned well. (In Japan, half the handsets have cameras in them and their users send each other pictures.)
On the other hand, in Europe the service providers are in deep trouble. They spent truly vast amounts of money on licenses for new spectrum which they can't actually use yet. The licenses specify that they can only be used for WCDMA, and none of the equipment suppliers are actually ready for deployment. Some of the operating companies are talking about giving the licenses back.
And others are beginning to ask if they can have permission to deploy CDMA2K instead, but the bureaucrats in the EU aren't having any of it. Yet.
I confess to a deep feeling of satisfaction about this on a personal level, primarily because of all the horseshit I put up with from GSM fans over the years when they talked about how superior the European approach to this was.
The thing is that if the US had followed the same policy, CDMA would never have been given the chance to prove itself. We now have just as good of nationwide systems and just as much portability as the Europeans do, only our system is fundamentally better. GSM has many features which are marvelous, but they can eventually be grafted onto IS-95 and CDMA2K, because they're all implemented at high protocol levels or don't have anything to do with the RF link. IS-95 and CDMA2K have many cool features, too, but it isn't possible to implement them on a TDMA air interface, so the only way that GSM can have those features is to toss TDMA and switch, which is what they're now trying to do.
So I'm sitting here basking in the warm glow of schadenfreude because nemesis has caught up with European hubris in the cell phone industry.
But there's more to this, because in the microscopic this turns out to be a morality tale which more broadly shows the difference in approaches to most things between the Europeans and the Americans, and I think demonstrates quite clearly why our way is more successful.
Though the adoption of a continent-wide standard for Europe in the 1990's did have certain benefits, it also had some hidden prices. It gave them compatibility, but it was also protectionism, and as is always the case with industries shielded by protectionism, the European cell phone companies became arrogant and complacent, and as a result they fell badly behind. Now they're trying to catch up, and it isn't turning out to be easy. They licensed Qualcomm's patents, but what they're now discovering is that Qualcomm didn't patent everything it knows about making CDMA work, and that it's a really difficult problem. (Damned straight it is. We know a hell of a lot we're not telling. It's pretty straightforward to make it work badly and unreliably, using a lot of battery power. Making it work well on low power is damned tough, and that knowledge is not for sale.)
Part of their problem is that they're trying to run before they've learned to walk. Qualcomm and its partners are moving to CDMA2K after many years of working with IS-95, but the GSM coalition is jumping straight into WCDMA cold.
Like all protected industries, the GSM companies didn't make the investment they should have early enough. Part of why they're way behind is that they started late, and much of that was because of ego, because they didn't want to admit that Qualcomm had been right (or to pay Qualcomm royalties). So they lost two full years in lawsuits and negotiations with Qualcomm before the real design process could begin. And then they discovered that the problem was harder than it looked. As it now stands, it's going to be an interesting question to see whether they can ever get it to work (especially to get interoperability), and more importantly, even if they do to see whether they will be too late and will have missed the market window. I think they will make it work, but I think it will be too late.
Here are some of the lessons I see in this.
First, Europe pulled this decision up to as high a level as it could. When the legal mandate to use GSM was passed, the EU didn't yet exist. Individual nations each passed such laws based on a consensus. In the US, that decision was pushed down as far as possible, and the superiority of CDMA over any TDMA-based system was decided by millions of cell phone users who voted with their wallets.
Second, Europe tried to stop the clock. It decided that it had the final answer with GSM and that no further experimentation was necessary because no further improvement was possible. In the US, the government kept its hands off, and in fact if another newer system comes along which is superior to CDMA, it will have the same opportunity commercially that CDMA had. (Not quite; the market has evolved and we're into the "standardization and shakeout" phase now. But there won't be any government mandate preventing it.)
Europe emphasized cooperation over competition, consensus and agreement over "let's try it and see what happens". It was viewed as important that there be compatibility over the whole continent, and to achieve that they outlawed competition. In the US, we valued competition, and ironically we not only ended up with compatibility over the whole continent but got that compatibility with a superior system which emerged out of competition.
Despite claims to the contrary, Europe passed those laws in part precisely because the standard which was being protected was European and most of the equipment which would be used was homegrown. Part of why those laws were passed was to lock out the US. (Some American companies made GSM equipment, but they never had much market share in Europe.) In the US, everyone was free to compete, and for quite a while the largest seller of handsets here was Nokia. GSM was deployed here and attempted to compete against CDMA on a level playing field, and got handed its ass.
GSM fans will point out that GSM is more broadly deployed elsewhere in the world than IS-95. They'll be careful not to point out the extent to which bribery played a role in that. (Things like "If you choose GSM over CDMA, we'll build a factory there" which is how GSM mostly won in Brazil.)
But that kind of thing is ultimately self-defeating, and TDMA/GSM isn't going to be competitive against CDMA2K, and the Europeans can't make WCDMA work reliably. And as a result of that, a lot of the cellular telecom companies in Europe are in deep financial trouble, not to mention facing legal deadlines for deployment of 3G which cannot possibly be met. MobilCom in Germany is near death, for example, and just announced that it would lay off 40% of its staff. Apparently it would already be dead were it not for a 400 million loan from the German government, which has angered the EU. And because the telecom companies in Europe are all so heavily cross invested, this is a cascading problem. Part of why Mobilcom is in trouble is because France Telecom SA is in trouble and had to renege on an investment commitment. You're eventually going to see a chain-reaction sequence of commercial failures as the money runs out, or more likely you'll see huge government subsidies.
Both these articles say that CDMA2K is "controlled by Qualcomm". That's true and not true. There's an industry standards body, and Qualcomm is probably the most important and influential member of it. It's also true that most of the CDMA2K proposal came out of Qualcomm. But the members of that standards body understand that they're going to get further by cooperation than by competition, and there's very much a "can do" attitude there which helped get a standard approved a long time ago. Qualcomm's proposal wasn't predatory. (By comparison, Sun's Java standards have been predatory, because part of the goal is to keep Sun the largest player in the Java business. Qualcomm is not the largest player in CDMA and probably never will be.) There's also heavy emphasis on interoperability and testing and standards compliance, and there is an independent testing laboratory, which even Qualcomm uses to verify its own products.
Another of the ironies in this is that "cooperative" Europe has turned out not to be cooperating as well as "competitive America". The companies involved in the CDMA2K process are cooperating closely because it's in their own best interest to do so, not because of some sort of fuzzy philosophy of "cooperation and centralization are good things". The companies in the CDMA2K process are cooperating because they know they'll be killed if they don't, not to mention the fact that they smell GSM's blood.
This kind of thing has played out much the same way hundreds of times before between Europe and the US, and nearly always it's had the same result. And as Europe increasingly centralizes and "harmonizes" and moves more and more authority to Brussels, it's going to keep happening. Decisions will be made from the center, and a lot of the time they'll be made wrongly because the "center" is not the infinite repository of all wisdom. The "center" chose GSM/TDMA to be the winner; America decided to let the market figure out the winner, and it didn't turn out to be GSM/TDMA.
European centralization turned out to be a competitive advantage - for the US. And that's going to keep happening. If I was vicious and wanted to wish failure and misery on Europe, I could think of nothing better to inflict it than the process going on now whereby more and more authority will move to Brussels to be used by unelected bureaucrats who answer to no one.
Update 20021006: Michael Jennings offers his perspective. He was involved in the cellular industry in Australia and saw the same GSM arrogance I put up with.
Update: Though the EU didn't exist then, the GSM mandate came from the EC rather than being passed by individual nations.
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 -
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 ?
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.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
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.
Yeah, sure. The really really nice thing about GSM in Europe? "It just works... Everywhere". Can that be said about *any* of the mobile networks in the US?
I'm all for open competition. As long as my phone continues to work *everywhere*.
Deleted
Yep - an excellent summary...
Cheers,
Ian (not anti-US, just anti-daft cheerleading in the face of overwhelming reality)
For the factually obsessed:
It wasn't actually Schröder making the comparison, but the minister of Justice of his cabinet.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
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.
Incidentally, as far as I know, only providers that use GSM (in the US, Voicestream/Deutsche Telekom) offer prepaid accounts - like a debit card, you load them up with credit. This has two advantages: 1) You can't run up a huge phone bill, because after you run out of credit no outgoing calls are allowed (with the exception of emergency calls) until you buy more credit, and 2) the mobile company has no information about who you are. Because you buy the SIM card in a brick and mortar store, you can pay for it in cash and the mobile company will never know who you are. Just food for thought.
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.
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.
Some people here have been getting confused about some things so let me clarify: There is a difference between discussing a SYSTEM (GSM, UMTS, CDMA 1x, CDMA2000, Iden) and discussing it's RADIO ACCESS METHOD (TDMA, CDMA, W-CDMA). For the record: GSM: Uses the TDMA Radio Access Method. UMTS: Uses the WCDMA radio Access Method. CDMA: obviously uses CDMA radio access method. A previous poster did a good job of clarifying how the different Radio Access methods work so I won't get into it. The main differences between the different systems that use the same Radio Access Method (Umts and Cdma 2000) is architecture -- that is, how the system is structured and built, as well as the messanging that goes on to bring up and support a call. So in talking about how "good" one system is vs. another, it really does no good to compare say CDMA2000 to UMTS. YES there will be some significant differences between the systems, but not in the way the information is sent on the air. If you want to talk about differences, talk about other things other than the Radio Access method.
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?
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"
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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
Very good comparison too. This is exactly what was happening in nationalistic Germany before WWII. Exactly the same type of paranoid patriotism.
BTW. I don't feel the parent is a troll, please read the article and if you know cell tech you'd know what this dude is saying.
The upshot is that the CDMA phone uses just enough transmit power to be received by the base station, and no more. Hence, longer battery life.
Phones have been able to do that since the analog days, and thus isn't a particularly impressive feature.
Bandwidth utilization is of course very nice, though.
The enemies of Democracy are
UMTS uses CDMA at the RF layer
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
AARGH!! This story is getting worse everytime it's being told!
First: It wasn't Schröder who did this, but one of his ministers in a unimportant election speech in some small town!
Second: She didn't compare GWB and Hitler either, but just happened to mention both names within one sentence without any direct comparision!!
I recently was in Taiwan and even there I saw this story on the front page of the newspaper. People, move on. Nothing to see here. The whole thing is not true and has been dramatically overblown by the media!
Sorry for being OT, but this whole story makes me angry...
We didn't pick the pricing structure, it was merely foisted upon us, and we accepted it because they put fluoride in our water supply.
Seriously, you're right, it's really stupid, but now it's set. It becomes especially problematic for someone like me who uses only a mobile as his primary phone.. and then you get calls from telemarketers...
(Although for the record I can't believe you guys have been paying for metered local landline calls for years - that seems insane to me.)
Now Japan, they've got it sorted. Oh wait...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
So, they don't teach history where you're from?
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
Or more specifically, W-CDMA. CDMA has won at the RF later.
That said, if you read his article, CDMA2000 (The "next generation" after IS-95 CDMA) is Here Now while UMTS equipment isn't here yet in a working form. W-CDMA has proven to be an embarassment for those providers that have rolled it out, and those that haven't are begging to use CDMA2000 instead of W-CDMA, and when the politicians say no, you see the multibillion dollar spectrum writeoffs you've been seeing right and left in Europe.
If UMTS is so much better than CDMA2000, then why have there been so many spectrum writeoffs in Europe, while you don't hear about Verizon or Sprint writing off massive amounts of spectrum?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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)
BIAS NOTE: I work for a major telecoms manufacturer on UMTS (the technical name for 3G - a W-CDMA technology).
This is an interesting commentary, but it fails to note many things.
First, the continent-wide adoption of GSM in Europe has led to huge take up of mobile phones. Everyone (schoolkids upwards) has one, communications across networks are not a problem (and are cheap), moving across national boundaries are not a problem (hell - I closed a deal on buying a house (in the UK) over the phone while crossing the border between France and Spain). There are various economic effects going on in Europe which make GSM a winner - the huge take-up, the ease of interconnection, SMS, etc.
That is not to say that GSM does not have problems. There are certainly capacity problems in many European cities - the operators are running out of bandwidth, and this is one of the drivers for the adoption of 3G. Certainly CDMA technology offers much high capacity than GSM. GPRS does offer adequate data rates for must currently conceivable apps, but doesn't do anything for the bandwidth problem. Of course, it's also possible that GSM/GPRS is the way forwards - especially if it will interwork with 802.11 a/b for high speed data in built up areas.
Oh, and did I mention that UMTS and CDMA (IIRC) are both frequency (rather than time) split between the uplink and downlink. This is fine for voice, but when you start running lots of hugely asymetric services (like web browsing), it doen't look so smart.
It is probably a bit disingenuous to claim that the Europeans can't make UMTS work. The system is just going into deployment now. All the major telco manufactureres have systems out on test, and not only are they testing their own kit, they are testing interoperability of parts of the system that are being built from rival vendors kit. So, for example the Radio Access Network might come from the people I work for, but the core comes from someone else. And they are making it work with 5 nines reliability. It will arrive, and soon.
The main problem, and one that is touched on in the article, is actually the huge take-up of GSM. The problem is that everyone who has a 3G phone is quite happy with it. Sure, new things come along all the while (e.g. picture messaging), but no-one has yet come up with a really good reason why you might want to trade in your GSM phone for a 3G one (what do you need up to 2Mb/s for on a phone??).The operators have a good reason for you to switch - they're running out of bandwidth - but that is their problem, not the users.
Probably, what will happen is that the new 3G phones will be dual system GSM/UMTS phones. Pure GSM will gradually be phased out, but will probably always remain in remoter areas where the arguments for 3G just don't stand up economically. The handover between the GSM and UMTS systems is quite nightmareish, but their are a lot of people wrking on it at present.
A big question is the business economics. Nokia are very strong in handsets, and they have a few UMTS contacts. Ericsson have the lion's share of UMTS contracts, but can't get the kit out of the door quick enough. Motorola doesn't have enough contracts, but may be heavyweight enough to survive to the next round, where the quality of competing products may count more. Most of the rest are dead in the water. Alcatel, Lucent, Siemens, Nortel. would you honestly count on any of them being around in a year or so?
Hold on, it's going to be bumpy, but I think UMTS will arrive. CDMA won't disappear, but it won't go global. And the major problem that the US telcos have is their pricing models. There is more to a succesful business than technology - you have to have a product that people want.
regards, treefrog
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."
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?
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.
I'm sick and tired of Americans being labeled bigots every time they refuse bend over, beg for forgiveness, and admit the rest of the world (mainly Europe) is superior.
Come on, like the countries in Europe don't act snotty about their culture and their accomplishments (see France for example). Try opening a non-French language store in France (not necessarily English either) or a non-Orthodox place of worship in Russia or Greece. In the 80's Japan shoved its economic and technical accomplishments in our faces on a daily basis. Japanese leaders called us lazy. There are plenty of examples of non-US pride.
American culture has problems with xeno-relations? Bullcrap. There is no other place on earth where so many different cultures exist together in relative tolerance. No other place where ideas and customs from different cultures are accepted and blended. Did you know after 9/11 there has been more violence against Jews in France than Muslims in the US? Research it yourself. You want to see xeno-relation problems? Try being a Catholic in Northern Ireland or a Muslim in Serbia.
Look, just because another country or countries criticize us or do things differently doesn't mean they are necessarily right. Remember that every country is looking out for their own interests. America is not perfect and we do thing for our own best interest. But this is a competitive world, lest you forget. Every country is proud of its accomplishments and every country tries to get ahead. Don't be a hypocrite and think the US has to play by some other special rules.
Brian Ellenberger
Yes, US-based carriers have taken a hit. But at least they haven't been forced to take government loans like MobilCom in Germany.
The flaw in your article is stating that the US providers are hutring a little, while ignoring the fact that European wireless providers are in *serious* financial trouble.
Again, it would help you to read the article...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Well, considering that you couldn't really -do- any of that cool stuff in the States until recently, it may be more of a case of "technological lag" than "cultural difference". People in Europe obviously only used their phones as phones before neat data services became available. I imagine that once there becomes a critical mass of data-enabled devices out there, then you'll start seeing these services used more commonly.
The enemies of Democracy are
I think Japan is a model of the future and why CDMA2000 will win out over W-CDMA (except for possible issues with European mandates to use problematic technology)
In Japan, DoCoMo rolled out W-CDMA and had to issue 2 major handset recalls and in general has had serious problems. Their name is mud thanks to W-CDMA. Their competitor, KDDI, has implemented CDMA2000 and has been extremely successful with it.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
UMTS (the broken piece of crap you refer to) is W-CDMA, not TDMA.
It's still, as you say, horribly broken at the moment.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
>Wow, thats even more hilarious than when it was posted (and modded to -1) just a number of posts ago!
>Good thing this was posted with a +1 bonus, LOL!
Sigh... I'm trying to be constructive here.. we we need a FAQ for the noobs. Here goes:
1) Slashdot is NOT realtime. I repeat Slashdot is NOT realtime.
Still confused? That means when I posted, there were NO posts to "copy" from, or make mine redundant.
2) What +1 bonus??
If your "non-coward" posts are as insulting as this, perhaps that's WHY all your posts default moderate to 1 (or 0)?
For me, using the "+1" would just unnecessarily bring my post to "3".
-Sleepy
Not hiding behind Anonymous. I've pegged my karma anyways which is probably why I can't moderate.
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...
Betamax is to overtake VHS because it is the better technology. Doh, they just killed Betamax and VHS has the market!
CDMA vs GSM is more or less the same given that GSM is the standard technology in almost every country bar two - www.gsmworld.com has GSM coverage details.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
Only GSM providers offer prepaid accounts?
What about Verizon's FreeUP plans? Or Virgin Mobile?
Sprint doesn't seem to do prepaid, they do have a non-contract monthly service though.
Not sure about AT&T or Cingular
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
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?
Search 2010 Gen Con events
CDMA is a method of transmission, GSM is not. GSM is a collection of technologies for communication, of which transmission method is one of them. If GSM decided to include CDMA into GSM it would be possible, but it would not necessarily use the same data format across those frequences, nor the same frequency band. To find out more, see the GSM Technologies page.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
No doubt the site is slashdotted simply from the large number of people (like myself) who have no idea what this refers to.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
BT generally tends to charge roughly the same sort of price to call each of the mobile networks. This price is higher than the local/national calls. The advantage we have is that all mobile/personal numbers start with 07. So if you give me 07123 456789 I know how much it's going to cost me before I call.
If I am on T-Mobile and I phone Vodafone then it'll cost me about 48 pence per minute (as it's cross network). Vodafone gets nothing as it's the receiving party. If I call my own network then it costs very little.
In the UK, the operators don't charge you for the receiving bandwidth, just the outgoing one. Therefore it is up to them to make it so that their customers call people as much as possible to get their revenue, rather than encouraging other people to call them (it's much easier to incentivise someone to call people on their mobile than it is to say, "hey, get your friends to phone you more!").
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
This probably has a lot to do with the higher cost and hassle of getting land-lines in Japan, and also in a lot of areas of Europe. North America has/can-have some nice rates for land-lines, whereas in other countries they often cost a lot and can take forever to get installed.
I have a friend who recently went to Japan. Things may be different because she's a foreigner, but she found it much more convenient to get a cellphone.
Of course, cell plans in North America have gotten nicer, with "unlimited minutes" plans for certain times,etc.
I'd be using only a cellphone myself, except the bastard telephone company requires that you have a land-line to get ADSL, and I hate the local cable service.
Of course, technology has its problems. I seem to remember hearing some issues about Japanese kids, phones with web-browsers, and porn in public places.
A crowded subway and many people with the same ringtone, oh the fun - phorm
It actually is.
Don't forget please that they are individual countries, not one big united country. these countries use different languages, different phone lines and many of them different currencies. And I am still able to use my gsm cell phone almost everythere in europe.
Such thing would be far easier to achieve in a single country than in multiple ones.
Besides, EU+Russia are already bigger than USA, add nearly the rest of the world and you got the picture.
I remember going to Estonia two months ago. The bus went through Germany, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, finally through Estonia. And my cell phone had a connection all the time, I could make this trip without dropping a call.
In Estonia however, I bought a local GSM SIM card because it would be cheaper than roaming. It worked without any problem with my GSM phone. I even bought a new GSM phone in Estonia because they are just cheaper there and it worked without any problem with my german GSM card.
Before I did this, I met a man from Swizerland in Estonia, with his GSM phone. We exchanged phone numbers and he called me. With a swiss gsm phone and card, he called me with a german gsm phone and card and we both were in Estonia. Now that is fun!
And everything would still work if I had decided to went to Russia or Finland directly from Estonia.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
From the CIA World Factbook:
[...] Germany has one of the world's most technologically advanced telecommunications systems [...] connected by modern networks of fiber-optic cable,[...]
France: highly developed [...] extensive cable and microwave radio relay; extensive introduction of fiber-optic cable;
Italy: modern, well developed, fast; fully automated telephone, telex, and data services
Actually, the reverse could true. In standardising the various froms of DSL, special respect to the US situation had to be paid. Only two wires, high impedance. A professor of mine (lived in Germany/Sweden) called them "Klingeldraehte", which means they are usually used for a doorbell.
In my experience, the US is highly diverse. Including the infrastructure. In some regions, you have a top-notch infrastructure some people only can dream of (highways, public transport, telephone), in others you're better of with a pidgeon and a mule.
The higher influence of the state controlled monopolistic telcos lead to an almost equal level of quality (not to mention the equally high costs)
> This is why Europe pushed so hard at establishing the GSM standard for the continent.
Actually, before having GSM, each country in Europe had it's own analog network. They became aware of the various disadvantages of this approach and started almost at the same time with the developement of GSM.
In 1982 the Group Spécial Mobil was founded.
The first commercial analog cellular based on AMPS was introduced in 1983 (Japan 1979, Nordic Europe 1981)
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Mobile phones have a seperate area code to landlines, so do free phone (toll free) numbers, lo-call (charged local call rate no matter where you are), and premium rate numbers.
So if you dial an area code starting 01xxx or 02xxx then you know its a national rate land line call. if you dial 07xxx its a mobile, 09xxx premium, etc.
This also means that a mobile phone could be registered anywhere in the country, the first few digits of the number only tell you which telecoms provider they are with.
The exact cost of the call to a mobile varies according to how much that mobile phone carrier, and how much the originating carrier charges. Which can vary, but not much generally. In the same way that the exact cost of a premium rate call can vary, but the area code prefix tells you the rough size of charge.
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 ?
"In short, the European politicians said, "If you want to stay in business, you MUST buy this spectrum at the prices we dictate""
Ummmm, no. In several countries the licenses were handed out in a "beauty-contest", where the telcos only had to pay nominal fees. As to the countries that auctioned the liceses. They did not dictate the prices. The operators wanted those licenses and they competed between each other, THAT'S what drove the price up. Governments didn't dictate the price, it was settled in a bidding-war. In other words: the price was decided in an auction.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
At least now I know why I couldn't get into USS Clueless this morning. All you guys were there first!
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
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.
Actually I lied. Sorry. It's 30p/minute on Pay as you go at the most. 10p/minute if you spend over £20 a month.
Thats not roaming by the way, thats just calling another network. Roaming is when you go, say, abroad and your phone connects to another companies network. When that happens the pricing gets rather horrible as you have to pay a small portion of the incoming call (which is more in line with the US, and we hate!).
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
NTT DoCoMo
They rolled it out
It flopped
DoCoMo's name is mud thanks to W-CDMA
Their competitor has 2.3m 3G subscribers, DoCoMo (which rolled out earlier) has 125,000 or so. (Or was it 135? Still, a fraction of KDDI's)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Hell, NO! That lie doesnt get any more true by repeating it!
Licenses were either comparatively cheap or auctioned off. The auctions had a cheap start price. The resulting bidding wars should be blamed to the operators.
Why isn't wireless service in the U.S. like long distance service in the U.S.? :-P
In many ways, wireless service in the USA is better than long distance service. Most plans you find nowadays let you call all across the country from wherever you are and it just comes out of your regular minute allotment. As long as you don't exceed that you don't pay anything extra. Given how most plans give you thousands of minutes, exceeding the allotment in many cases isn't an issue either. Even the cheapest long distance plans cannot compete with that.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
There are at least to mobile providers in the uk which depolyed an alternative digital service rather than GSM. I forgot the name of the system but I believe it is similar to CDMA systems used in the USA.
There never was any government mandate, just agreements between manufacturers to support a single system for the whole world (except for the USA).
Thankyou for playing.
A big reason for the different approaches is simply the differing political structure between US and Europe: not just the greater "capitalist fundamentalism" of the US, but the fact that the US is a relatively homogenous single market, whereas Europe is forced to deal with a slew of languages, cultures, and national governments. Approaches to these problems are necessarily different, and trying to claim one or the other is "better" is comparing homogenous apples to segmented tangerines.
The sense I got from the article was that the author just wanted to do an "I told you so", which was prompted specifically by experiences he apparently had in dealing with e.g. Ericsson on the technological issues. Having worked in similar (much smaller scale) situations, I think I know exactly what he means - I've encountered NIH syndrome plenty of times, and I've watched with satisfaction when the technically superior approach I was advocating wins out over the entrenched politically-backed incumbent technology. I can sympathise with the impulse to publicly tweak the people who previously made things more difficult than they needed to be. It's unfortunate that because of the nature of the situation, this devolves into a macho Europe vs. America contest, and the author of the article bears some responsibility for this.
Since I'm neither American nor European, I'll happily sit back and let you guys duke it out and use the best technology that comes out of it. No matter how you slice it, competition works well, in the end - whether between technologies or political structures.
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.
Does anyone imagine that roaming in the US is anything other than a method to seriously soak the traveler?
Not just travellers (or in rural areas). If you get a cell phone dead spot and have to switch to analog mode, some carriers consider that "roaming" even if you're in your local area. You get hit.
According to the article, qualcomm licensed the basic patents for CDMA to the european companies, but never gave up the technology it takes to get it to work properly, thus prepping themselves to dominate the market. So europeans are stuck with phones that won't work very well with the new standard, which happens to be completely incompatible with the old.
Ha Ha. You scoundrels.
I'll be laughing my ass off when europe gives up on CDMA2K and moves to a superior RF standard like 802.11 or Universal Wide Band (UWB), and Qualcomm is left with nothing.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
The only control you don't have is that you don't know which service provider they are on. Since every mobile number starts with 07, you can tell instantly if it's going to cost more than usual. You did used to be able to work out which network provider people were on by the first couple of numbers, but since people are now free to port their number to any mobile network - it doesn't work any more. For example, i'm 07957 which is a T-Mobile allocated number but actually I'm on Vodafone.
It does suck a bit.
At 30p/minute, you could run up a substantial bill with a relatively small amount of talking, and that would make me uncomfortable calling anyone with a mobile number-- unless I knew that person and was sure that they had a good cheap plan.
Their plan has nothing to do with it. It's YOUR plan that matters as YOU will be the one paying for the call. Even so, you can pick up tariffs that give you inclusive minutes to other networks (so they become almost free) and calling mobile to mobile on the same network is either free or billed at something like a couple of pence per minute. Calling landlines (local and national) is the same low pence too.
Why should some stranger be concerned with saving me money? A lot of are concerned with their own outlay and will look for good competitive plans if they're the ones shelling out the money. They don't necessarily do the same when other people are paying.
Eh? You've lost me now. In the UK it's all about what you are paying not what other people are paying. It won't cost you anything to receive them irrespective of what network they are on or even whether they are calling from a home phone, mobile or public phone booth. If you phoned my number now from the US, it wouldn't cost me a thing. Nothing, nada, zip. It would cost you, but then you're making the call.
And if you don't want to pay a particular fee (in an amount you'll know, because it's your plan), you have full control-- just don't pick up the call.
I snipped your comments about packages that reduce the cost as we have them too. As for the not picking up the call, maybe so, but I tend to answer every call I get because it might be important - but again, thats because I don't have to screen them first to decide whether or not I want to pay someone to be able to talk to me.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Compared to what? Antarctica?
Well, y'all jes' have a nice day now, y'heah?
Have been holding off on rolling out W-CDMA because no equipment manufacturers have been able to get it to work properly.
There must be SOMETHING wrong if they *can't get it to work* while CDMA2000 is here now and working extremely well.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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 is about 3G, not 2G/2.5G
Next-gen GSM, aka UMTS/W-CDMA has proven to be a nightmare for all carriers that have tried to work with it. The Europeans don't even have equipment that works at all yet, and DoCoMo rolled out UMTS a year ago and the problems that ensued turned their name into mud in Japan.
China's current endorsement of UMTS is lukewarm to say the least - They're seeing the problems in Europe/Japan and starting to think about CDMA2000 isntead.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This column has a lot of bias for CDMA, which is understandable, as the author has worked for Qualcomm. However, one of his points is basically FUD: the mention that Brazil has chosen GSM because of bribery.
Brazil has started deploying GSM networks only this year. Previously, cellular companies used AMPS, which was later migrated to TDMA and CDMA, in different parts of the country. GSM was chosen as a new standard because it was the easiest upgrade path for TDMA, which was the largest installed base.
For the public, GSM phones are selling like hotcakes here for one simple reason: the SIM card (or "personality chip", like it's called in the article) inhibits stealing service over the air. In Brazil, cell phone cloning is a widespread problem, and criminals actively monitor CDMA frequencies to grab handset codes to steal (certain regions are known as a hotbed of cloning, and people are advised to NOT turn on their phone when passing through, as the likelihood of being cloned is very high). This is not possible with GSM, as this depends on a key on the card.
So, GSM is selling now, but it's not the entrenched standard, rather the upstart. And it's selling because it provides something that people in Brazil want, not because of bribery of the government, like the article alludes to.
Disclaimer: I work for a GSM cellullar company in Brazil.
This does not change the import of what I am saying. Their practices to hold onto customers, which include not giving the codes, but also other things, result in a system that is inferior in all ways but technical to the European system.
The only good weather is bad weather.
The "chaos" wasn't apparent, it was real. And it continues: we still have, what, three or four different incompatible systems being used?
Europe has had many years of excellent service with GSM. Now the standard is getting a bit old, and maybe they'll switch to (and standardize on) something CDMA-based.
And what makes him think the chaos is only temporary in the US? Other, incompatible systems will come along and the chaos will continue.
Because of exactly what I said - No manufacturer has been able to get one to work properly. In trying to dispute what I said, you simply stated an effect of the problem.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
Well, yes, and water usually runs downhill.
Presumably the *caller* has something to say and is willing to pay for it. That's how it works in all other media and everywhere else except for phones in the US. The idea that the recipient pays for the call is very backwards. You ain't gonna get no wireless culture in the US until people learn to pay for the bandwidth they use.
--Bud
"Qualcomm's proposal wasn't predatory. (By comparison, Sun's Java standards have been predatory, because part of the goal is to keep Sun the largest player in the Java business."
Everytime I say this on slashdot I get hammered by how "open" sun has made Java. Its about as open as that worm sitting on the hook in your face.
I also noticed he said they didn't patent their most secret information. That was interesting. BAsically they patented things they wanted to sell, but did not patent their secrets. Thats counterintuitive to how patents seem to be advertised.
So basically you can either 1) buy a CDMA phone now, be forced to upgrade to 3G and still be stuck to US-only networks... Or you can 2) buy a GSM tri-mode phone and use it globally until you need to upgrade to 3G.
Sounds like CDMA might have won the war, but they lost so many battles that it's irrelevant.
I would like that. You wanna know why?
Every time I make a long distance call, the carrier on the other side demands a fixed (government-regulated) per-minute charge. That used to be minimal, but the cost of long-distance has come down so much that it now represents a large portion of the cost of a long-distance call.
There's little incentive to reduce this charge, because:
a) it's set by a government agency (as are the charges in Europe, I imagine), and is therefore somewhat immune from competitive forces...
b) even it weren't regulated, companies would take advantage of it as a way to screw customers (sort of like collect calling.) Because you don't pay the cost of somebody else calling you, why would you go out of your way to get the best deal? If a company said "you can have free outgoing calls, but people who call you'll pay 20 cents a minute", a lot of people would jump on it.
Although it's contrary to "fairness", making people pay for all their own calls is the best system possible. Assuming a competitive market, you don't have to invoke the inefficiency of government price-regulation. And you also avoid the lack-of-information/desperation traps that you see in things like collect calling. And if you don't want to pick up a call, just check the caller ID.
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.
Who cares if a phone can be used with another provider? It usually ends up costing hundreds more to avoid a 2 year contract. Anyone who is willing to buy their own phone and pay month-to-month is certainly rich enough to buy another phone when they switch.
For the average American cell phone user by the time your contract is up your phone is hopelessly out of date. I will certainly buy a new phone when I change plans just because I can.
GSM is ubiquitous in Europe because it was mandated by the government. I don't think anyone is going to argue that it isn't convenient to be able to use one phone all over Europe.
:)
The point of this article is NOT that GSM sucks now; rather that GSM has a broken upgrade path. This doesn't necessarily mean that GSM is going away. Europeans will continue to use GSM for as long as it is economically feasible for operators to maintain the network.
European operators have a few choices for the future:
1. Hope that wCDMA gets fixed before they go bankrupt from servicing their bandwidth debt without 3G income
2. Switch their next generation network choice to CDMA2000 and gain compatibility with American/Korean/Japanese networks
3. Get their bandwidth auction money back and give up on 3G.
It usually takes a while to go from "no working implementation" to "successful rollout", so Option 1 seems overly optimistic. It seems likely that dual-mode GSM/wCDMA phones would be bulky considering the difference in the networks.
Option 3 will work fine until Europeans grow dissatisfied with lagging the rest of the world with their 2G network. Having folks in other countries diss your phone technology kinda sucks
Option 2 results in a single worldwide 3G network, countered by the fact that GSM operators (and host countries) have to admit that it is OK to license and use US technology.
How who looks like the stubborn nationalists?
Whar's me points when I need em?
One simple rule for its versus it's
Easy: Free Local Calling Area
(hint: US billing structure)
Hopefully someone else will post and connect the dots for you, but right now I'm just going to go back to reading the comments ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
I have a strong incentive to find the plan with the lowest rates for calls I make.
So does everyone else.
The person calling me isn't going to be overcharged because they, like me, have chosen a plan which minimises their costs.
Nobody gets any surprises, everyone is in complete control of their own expenditure because only they can take actions which cost them money (or use up their 'free' minutes).
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
He's not always right, but then again he chose his name wisely...
"AT&T currently uses IS-136 TDMA"
AT&T currently also uses GSM (as does Verizon in some markets) which is a very good thing because their old PCS signal quality was not something to be particularly proud of.
And why does he not mention UMTS (is that what he calls WCDMA?). And why doesn't he call CDMA what it is: spread spectrum. There's no magic in it, it's just another way of allocating bits in a band.
Actually cell phones are cheaper in Europe than in the US, you are more free to switch providers without switching phones or vice-versa (yes there is much choice in providers and phones). Plus, until GSM grew in the US, the network coverage, signal quality, voice sound quality, and battery life of cell phones all over Europe was better than the US deployed digital systems. You could (still can) cheap prepaid phones for which the prepaid minuted expire only after 12 months (compare with 30 or 90 days and much higher rates in the US).
Also, it supported instant messaging from the get go years ago, so his 'protectionism' and 'complacency' argument doesn't hold foot in facts.
"... and ironically we not only ended up with compatibility over the whole continent but got that compatibility with a superior system which emerged out of competition."
I've actually had phones on both continents and that statement is just wrong. Cell networks in the US are a mess compared to Europe. In practice in the US, I cannot buy a cell phone from a third party and pick and choose my provider. You can in Europe, because the subscription is the sim card. When roaming in Europe, you usually can select multiple provider from which to roam, in the US, you'll just have to accept that your phone says no signal while a guy next to you is actually making a call.
If the GSM people were arrogant, it was for a reason: calls weren't dropped, you always have a signal (a 'can you hear me, good' commercial in Europe tells the viewers that the network for that provider obviously is in very bad shape), the phones worked across international boundaries and the prices were low.
Ahhh. I still hope he makes a followup though, because it still was a nice read...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Yes. It also doesn't matter if the mobile phone is next to you or at the far end of the country.
Bit of history ... a long while ago, if you called from a landline on BT to a BT Cellnet mobile (now called O2) then you got the call slightly cheaper. I have a feeling that Oftel (our telecoms governing body) told them to stop doing that as it was anti-competitive.
Or will I pay different charges depending on the particular plan/carrier chosen by the person I'm calling?
No. You'd pay the rate defined by your fixed line carrier (normally BT) for calling a mobile. The person you're calling wouldn't be charged a thing and their price plan wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference.
Hope that clears things up!
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
You're wrong about Serbia.
...
The Balkans have always been an important route for oil pipelines from the mighty mighty rich fields of the Caspian sea
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
What the hell? Of course they have a need for it. Stronger signals take more power, and thus the weaker the signal you can get away with sending, the better. Analog phones are constrained by battery life too, yah?
The enemies of Democracy are
How is it that they won the race when they're just releasing handsets now whereas CDMA2000 capable handsets have been out and working well for over a year? When the handsets that have been released have been shown to have compatibility issues with another vendor's infrastructure equipment? (Read the article and also a related article in The Economist, linked to a few times in comments.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
1. It costs my provider something to provide me with a voice circuit/channel, even if the call is incoming. Let's call that cost "c". (Obviously "c" isn't necessarily a fixed cost, but let's gloss over that by calling it an average.)
2. Obviously my provider doesn't do this work for free-- they expect to be reimbursed for the resources used, and therefore they bill that charge out to the caller's provider, at some agreed-upon rate "d". The value of "d" is either privately reached by agreement between the two providers, or more likely is mandated by the government so that smaller providers don't get screwed.
The value of "d" (the billing charge) may be loosely based on "c" (the cost of actually providing the service) but there's no absolute link. If my provider finds a way to save 20% on "c", the savings doesn't necessarily get passed along in "d". If "d" is a government mandated flat rate that applies to all of the carriers, it's possible that some providers are even clearing a substantial profit on this transaction ("d"-"c"), while others aren't.
3. Companies don't have always have direct incentives to reduce "d". If my provider reduces "d", I don't save any money-- only people on other providers will. In fact, most selfish consumers would probably rather that their own provider decreased the cost of their outgoing calls (charges they have to pay for) rather than decreasing the cost of incoming calls (charges someone else pays.)
You might argue that reducing "d" saves everybody money in the end. But that's not necessarily true. Assume that there's one big provider that has a huge customer base, and a few smaller providers that make up a minority of the market. The big provider has far less to lose by setting a high value for "d". For the big provider, a high "d" increases their own income and forces the other providers to raise rates on outgoing calls. For the small providers, a high "d" makes them less competitive. Consumers don't necessarily catch on to what's happening-- all they see is that the big provider can offer the best in-network rates to the largest number of customers.
Government regulation doesn't necessarily improve the situation. It's a slow process with four flaws: 1) it doesn't always adjust to changing market conditions, 2) it's vulnerable to political lobbying, 3) it frequently applies a single flat-fee ("d") to a service when different providers all have different costs ("c"), and 4) it's easy for providers to overstate their costs "c", so that "d" is set too high. This last case is worst for consumers, because it essentially results in a mass government subsidy that comes straight out of people's wallets.
So the best answer to all of this is to make the situation transparent to consumers. If you pay all the costs for making and receiving calls, you're likely to pick the plan with the lowest rates. This places direct consumer pressure on the providers to keep their rates low, rather than burying overcharges in a place that's one or two levels removed from consumer pressure.
Here in the US we have a system of long-distance where the government mandates the payment of a flat fee (about 2.5 cents/minute, last I checked) to the local telephone companies on either side of a long-distance call. No matter how cheaply the long-distance company routes the call, they can never charge less than 5 cents a minute without losing money. The entire telecom industry has caught on to this fact, and the big war now is to own both local and long-distance operations. Companies know that it costs far less than the clumsily mandated 2.5 cents to operate the local side of the call, and if you own both a local and long-distance operation, you can significantly reduce the cost of a long-distance call (and still turn a neat profit.)