Slashdot Mirror
CDMA vs. GSM in Post-war Iraq
An anonymous reader submits: "Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is pressing congress to favor CDMA over GSM for mobile phone service in U.S.-funded reconstruction plans. One reason for pushing this is that a CDMA system would benefit American companies, such as California-based Qualcomm, while GSM would favor European companies. Currently, GSM is the most widely used mobile standard in surrounding countries."
There's already that sort of aid on the way, and Bush wants another 8 billion or so to be spent on that in the first 6 months. That's not counting other private group charities. They have to look at all these different issues as part of rebuilding. It's like saying we shouldn't bother fighting the common cold until we've got cancer taken care of.
"He is still on Haliburton's payroll and still owns 8 million of Haliburton's stock options."
:)
I'm sorry, but thats incorrect. The quote below with source proves it....
"Cheney divested himself of all interest in Halliburton, the largest U.S. oilfield services company, after the 2000 election." CNN Money
Hope that helps clear things up
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
If you leave the last big town, to go bush
in Australia, you might as well leave your
GSM handset behind, in favor of a CDMA unit.
Cheaper than sta.phones, the CDMA had greater
range (over flat terrain) & about the same
air-time costs as GSM, here...
So, that's the terrain of Iraq like, then?
Here in New Zealand we have both networks. I do development of communications products using both systems. As I see it, for the end users, CDMA really only has an advantage if you need faster data. The other 99% of the users would be better off with GSM. CDMA proponents will give plenty of sound technical reasons why CDMA is better and they are right but from a practical point of view GSM wins almost every time. Some of the reasons for GSM are:
1. Don't have pay the Qualcomm fees so the pones are cheaper.
2. Sim cards allow the user to choose where and when to get their phone from instead of having to get permission to change from their telco.
3. There is generally a larger range of phones (see 2.), although some GSM telcos control network access, ours doesn't. The local CDMA phones are just plain ugly !
4. Roaming is better, my phone works in almost any country including the US, and you can count the number of countries a CDMA user can roam to with one hand.
On a political note I have to say this isn't a good look for country claiming to be there to help the local, not themself...
Seriously folks, in percentage of population, the US Military has already killed more Iraqi civilians than 9/11 killed Americans.
The obvious response to this is: so what? Percentage of the population? That's a pretty meaningless metric.
However, it's worth noting that you're actually correct... or may be, depending on how the numbers turn out.
September 11 killed about 3,000 Americans, out of a population of about 280 million. (All figures are rounded, of course, because I'm just too lazy to look them up for an argument as ridiculous as this one.) That's 0.0011%.
The Iraqi government claims that about 350 civilians have died during the war. Of course, they claim to have destroyed dozens of our tanks, too, so we know their claims are far from perfect. But let's go with the Iraqi number, just for kicks. There are about 25 million people in Iraq. That comes to 0.0014%. So by those numbers, you're right.
However, we only have confirmation of about 25 civilian deaths in Iraq. That's going to be too low, obviously, because we don't have confirmation of every single civilian death, but just to put a bracket around the numbers, that comes to exactly 0.0001%.
So whether or not there have been more Iraqi civilians killed as a percentage of total population than were killed on 9/11 remains to be seen; the percentages could be quite close, or they could be off by a factor of 10, depending on how the final math turns out.
But this is all just an exercise in arithmetic. It means nothing. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, so we're not there to exercise vengance. And if we were, we would still have a long way to go, because Iraq would still be 2,650 civilians short of the mark.
Let's not worry about what cell phones the Iraqis will use after we win, and worry instead about whether or not it's possible for us to win.
Nobody has the slightest doubt that we'll win. This has been, by some interpretations, the most successful military campaign in history, and that includes the ratio of civilians killed per ton of ordinance employed. In other words, this has been the most benign war in history so far, and yet we're still virtually unopposed. Our biggest concern right now, apart from avoiding civilian casualties, is harassment from irregulars behind our front lines. The biggest campaign of resistance the Iraqi forces can mount against us right now qualifies as a nuisance, and not even a significant nuisance.
There's no question that we're going to win.
I write in my journal
Anyone else notice that Halliburton (formerly helmed by Dick Cheney) got a nice contract to put out the oil wells that have been set on fire? Another coincidence?
Actually, no, no it isn't.
2 41-2002Dec29.html
4 .shtml
q gate/iraqgate.html
2 003/03/02/IN123519.DTL
u it/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/88244_sean2
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/ira
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/01/17/iraq.chemical.s
Defend your viewpoint, ass!
evil adrian
No, we're not getting food into Iraq because the priority for this war is the Oil.
Yes, that's right. It's all about oil. We want the oil, must have the oil. Got to have the oil.
Let me ask you a question, though. This war, including the postwar reconstruction, is probably going to cost us around 200 billion dollars, and that doesn't count the cost of the munitions we're using. We've used over a billion and a half dollars' worth of cruise missiles alone so far, and the war's only a week old. Two hundred billion dollars plus would have bought us practically all the Iraqi oil we could have hauled off. Why didn't we just buy it, and save everybody a lot of time, money, and trouble?
Why didn't the Coalition PLAN for the mines?
We did. That's why we thought to bring mine detection equipment-- not to mention a platoon of highly motivated bottlenose dolphins and sea lions-- to the party.
Second, Kuwait is right next door. Why can't we just land in Kuwait and deliver the food that way.
We are. Read the article.
I write in my journal
The fact that people are such twits to actually think a damn blow job is a big deal while the patriot act is just swell demonstrates the perverse sense of morality my fellow Americans have. I take that back. They're scared little blood thirsty fascist sheep.
Go ahead, call me a traitor. From traitors, that is a complement. Good thing the constitution transcends the toilet paper this administration thinks it is. There's going to be hell to pay when the brainwashing wears off. I think that shall be soon since there are already cries for Blair's head. When American death toll in this very *avoidable* war exceeds 1000, Bush may join blair at the Hague trial.
To back this up: some statistics
Percentage of budget of US foreign aid: 1.0% (dead last among western nations).
Percentage of that dedicated to military aid to allies: ~50%
Percentage of total aid that comes directly back to US companies: ~70%
Percentage of people polled that think we spend too much on foreign aid: 75%
Average response to the question, "how much should we spend on foreign aid?": 8.4%
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Why this got moderated up who knows... OT is what I'd have given it. But to reply:
While undoubtedly civilians will die in a war, there are two points to be made here:
1) You'd be a fool to think all those deaths were by US bombs alone. Sadam has been known to blame his own military mishaps (perhaps even bomb his own people if they get in his way) on the US. To put it in another point of view: it would be like the US calling a friendly fire incident an Iraqi attack. The point being those numbers are suspect. Sadam kills thousands of people every week (every day?) that he does not like, so where is the relation between these new deaths and 9/11? These could easily be a continuation of Saddams own murder-spree.
2) Only time will tell if Iraq is truly liberated at the end of this offensive, but suffice it to say the intent is there. Whereas the 9/11 attacks were in no way aimed at helping Americans break free of a murderous, genocidal, oppresive regime.
Compare apples to appales, I say.
Next time you're watching the bombs explode on CNN, remember how you felt on 9/11, and realize that the same thing is happening in Iraq, right now.
And has been for upwards of 10 years now. This reminds me of a saying I saw, though I cannot remember where now: "Do dead Iraqis only count if they are killed by the US?"
I felt devestated to see such a loss of life on 9/11. I do not like seeing peaceful citizens of Iraq being killed now. All the more reason to be taking care of things now so that the people of Iraq no longer have to put up with being killed en-masse by a dictator.
- Get in, give democracy, get out.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
What's best for Iraq? or What's best for Bush's friends?
USA is not the only ones "paying" for this and yet there are no open tenders, even within the USA economy, stuff is going directly to the republican cronies of GW Bush.
Eg Cheney's company Halliburton has the oil well capping project already, nobody else got a look in.
Surely if the USA people are paying for this (which I dispute that they are the only contributors), then shouldn't they be getting the best value for money available - which usually means some form of tender process, even if evaluation is fast tracked. This stuff shouldn't be automatically awarded to Bush's mates.
So what the hell happened to the "best interests of Afghanistan" after they were "liberated"?
USA global domination manifesto These people want to stop anyone anywhere from acting against their interest. So the only interests allowed will be their own. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Presently the rest of us who are not "against the USA" will be paying tribute taxes just to be left alone.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
CDMA-the-signaling-scheme rocks, yes. In fact, it rocks so hard that *all* 3G systems use it in one form or another.
;) [I'll readily agree that the consumer gets screwed in the current US situation. A lot could be remedied simply by making phones legally transferrable; as it is, if I buy your old Cingular phone and you buy my Sprint one, we both face hell in trying to get them reactivated.] ...But getting back on track, a *different* aspect of regulation is that, in the US, we've mandated that the cellular providers must strive to provide GPS-accurate location info from callers requesting emergency services (and hopefully, not under other circumstances, barring a warrant at least). The first Google hit referencing the system. In practical terms, this means that pretty much every CDMA-network phone being built has the GPS chipset integrated (being destined mostly for the American market, with some penetration in Korea and Japan, IIRC), but a lot of GSM phones are being built for a market without the requirement. (Yes, GSM phones/hardware sold in the US are required to meet the same standard; at this point, it's a question of 'but if it's easy for the Evil Baddies to order a bunch of locator-free phones from France, we're back to triangulation...')*
That includes 3G GSM systems- which result in royalty payments to Qualcomm- and China's new standard, which attempts to avoid paying same.
Confused? "GSM" is a standard for creating cellphone networks (think the top layers of the OSI stack). Old GSM networks used a link-layer/physical-layer scheme called TDMA, which kinda sucks compared to CDMA, in the sense that CDMA can cram many more bits into the same volume of aether. (Whether you use those bits for more voice calls- dig up oldschool GSM's max-callers-per-cell sometime, and you'll see it's ludicrously small for urban areas- or for high speed data is up to you.)
Now, Qualcomm, being the original CDMA pimps, have their own proprietary network standards, which, when implemented, generally leave out the features people do like about GSM- "features" being SIM cards, a useful aspect of telecoms regulation in Europe. They call these standards things like "CDMA2000" and "CDMA1X," hence the confusion.
So, I just ask that everyone realize how many independent variables exist:
0. Spectrum allocation - How many 'slots' will be reserved for competing telecom providers, if any?
1. Modulation (physical/link-layer techniques) - as noted, these mostly boil down to flavors of CDMA, if current-model hardware is used. An old TDMA network could probably be built entirely out of cheap surplus hardware, of course.
2. Network standard - How your cells coordinate with eachother; how your phones authenticate to your cells; etc etc etc. Basically, "stuff that goes in software." This is where the "CDMA vs. GSM" debate lies... but then we have:
3. Regulation/deregulation - GSM was raised in an environment regulating competition, meaning that a lot of thought has been given to allowing a choice of provider. In America, we never mandated a physical/link-layer standard, thus allowing Omnipoint to show up with GSM, Sprint with CDMA, and Verizon with their tri?-mode analog/TDMA/CDMA? network. As such, it's now technologically "impossible" (read: difficult; you'd need tri-mode multiband phones, *and* a shared billing/authentication standard) to allow the European ease of provider-switching, but we do get the benefit of being able to argue CDMA vs. GSM while holding A's Sprint phone up against B's Cingular.
So, those are the issues at hand, and they're mostly independent of eachother- you could mandate GPS-enabled GSM, you could build a 3G network on TDMA links (but that'd be an exercise in futility), you could demand Qualcomm add SIM-card equivalents to allow consumer choice among providers (who would, then, all still be Qualcomm customers, of course) if Qualcomm tech was decl
And everybody knows it was an accident. But okay, let's have it your way. Oh no, blood and gore! Let's end the war! Would ending the war end the suffering? Saddam would like us to pack up and go home so he could resume power and get back to the tyrant's regular business of inflicting suffering of a brutal and excruciating nature on his subjects; this kind of suffering as opposed to the comparatively few, inadvertent casualties due to the war.
Having no war in Iraq allows persecution. Having this just war is causing suffering for a time, but will end most of the suffering in the long run.
Horrible suffering like what you mentioned is imposed affliction du jour in Saddam's regime. Its torture methods include:
Report on the fact that the people of Iraq don't want to be "liberated."
Nine in 10 Iraqis welcome US invasion
With a smug smile they say, "We will liberate you from your God, your money, and your dignity."
"You just arrived. You're late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious. I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand. We came out of the grave." - liberated Iraqi
Listen to the experience of a former human shield in Iraq:
Open http://www.gsmcoverage.co.uk/coverage.html and click on Iraq
Core points:
1. There already is a limited GSM network in Iraq, KurdTel 900
2. The Iraqi government has ordered a GSM network to be installed, but UN sanctions have delayed it
3. gsmcoverage.co.uk has this article on the subject:
Plans to deploy a CDMA network in Iraq (28-Mar-03)
The California, USA, Congressman Darrell Issa has initiated a campaign to promote CDMA as the technology of choice for any future mobile phone network in Iraq. He has written to U.S. Agency for International Development demanding that the American CDMA system be used in preference to a system that he considers inherently European, and specifically French.
His letter harks back to the older, and long abandoned name for GSM - Groupe Speciale Mobile, presumably for its French language overtones, as opposed to Global System for Mobile Communications, its anglophile name today. He says that if "European" GSM technology is deployed in Iraq, much of the equipment used to build the cell phone system would be manufactured in France, Germany, and elsewhere in western and northern Europe. Furthermore, royalties paid on the technology would flow to French and European sources, not U.S. patent holders.
He seems to be under the impression therefore that Motorola has no interest in bidding for a GSM infrastructure contract - nor would Lucent, or Canada's Nortel Networks. This may well concern the shareholders of those companies who would be expecting them to bid for any available contracts.
He also says that CDMA phones incorporate GPS location technology, which may be a surprise to the vast majority of cell phone owners who will be hunting through their handset manuals looking for this function. His legitimate concern is that relief workers could be kidnapped or attacked, and a location aware handset would then enable them to be found. However, inserting GPS into a cell phone is nothing to do with whether it is GSM or CDMA - but down to the handset manufacturer simply implementing a location based solution. Also, GPS is not the only solution for locating a cell phone, network based solutions exist that can be deployed on both technology platforms. The fact that a GPS handset will be able to give its location anywhere in Iraq is pointless if the phone is out of cellular coverage though.
Of course, the greatest irony could be that a CDMA network is deployed - and Nokia wins the bulk of the handset sales contracts. Ironic, as Nokia, one of the "northern Europe" companies that Issa wants to block from working in Iraq makes CDMA handsets, but uses its own proprietary chipsets and doesn't pay royalties to Qualcomm.
It may be worth noting that Congressman Issa represents San Diego, hometown of Qualcomm who owns the CDMA technology used in cell phones. Also, in January, the US government's, National Communications System (NCS) awarded a priority connection contract, ensuring phone service would be unaffected by network congestion to T-Mobile, a GSM network.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Don't know if this is in duplicate, but here's the full text of the GSMA's reply.
Nice read, I might add, especially the bit about an American company installing a GSM network in (US-bombed) Afghanistan.
More than mere navel gazing.