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USTR Critical Of Japanese TD-CDMA Licensing
News for nerds writes "Yahoo Asia reports that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) said in its annual report that the Japanese government has so far refused to issue experimental licenses to certain U.S. companies to test the new TD-CDMA technology. It attacks China and S. Korea along the line. The funny thing is, according to Impress Internet Watch, the Japanese government states that no U.S. companies had actually applied for the license so far. ITmedia also reports the Japanese government didn't deny foreign application, while criticizing the government for too narrow bandwidth of TD-CDMA that can be monopolized easily. Is this the precursor of another wave of pressure onto technology from Japan?"
That's it - this means war!
Most of these cellphone acronyms go in one ear and out the other, but I thought the "new" thing was GSM. Weren't TDMA and CDMA on their way out?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Ok.
Lawrence Lessig has quite a convincing argument for 'freeing' spectrum- in short (and not giving it the justice it deserves- he says it better in 'The Future of Ideas'), a lack of regulation (both legal and 'structural' regulation- i.e. the internet isn't structurally regulated whereas the phone system is, being centrally regulated) worked absolute wonders for the Internet. If the internet wasn't end-to-end and open, it'd be a shadow of what it is now.
So, basically, he believes that the spectrum is a medium which could be much like the internet, given protocols and standards that allowed things to connect using it.
As something somewhat like the internet would be much more useful than something like the phone system in the long run, I think the real news here, rather than there being a US-Japan spectrum spat, is that countries are squabbling over how to miserly regulate the spectrum in the first place.
RD
could anyone give a heads up for people who dont know what TD-CDMA licensing is? cmon, we all want to be too lazy to RTFA.
Is America going to be the leader and develop high quality technology that other countries can come begging for, or is it going to sit at Japan's doorstep begging for scraps?
Japan must feel like how I did in Civ2. I was always so far ahead of the rest of the nations because I focused on developing technology while the rest of the world was more interested in building up their militaries.
I have been pwned because my
I seem to recall a similar debate over the U.S.'s attempt to push the use of CDMA at the expense of of GSM in Iraq.
The words pot and kettle come to mind
The preceding line was intentionally left blank.
This just in from Japan:
"All your CDMA are belong to us."
A lot of GSM folks champion that standard, and it has done well in becoming "the" standard in Europe, Africa and Asia, but technnologically, CDMA is superior technically - for example, it has higher data transfer capacity and has lower radiation levels. It is a pity that such a huge infrastructure based on GSM exists, but I think that a move towards CDMA can only be a good thing.
Skytel
Has anyone noticed that USTR is only 1 place in the alphabet different to USSR ?
CDMA: Code Division Multiple Access. Here the entire allowed frequency spectrum is used (actually a band) by every user. The idea (in simple terms) is to send out signals that are coded with each user's individual (and unique) code so that only that user can decode it to get meaningful information, everyone else sees that information as noise. You don't need different frequencies in adjacent cells as in traditional cellphone technology (TDMA).
GSM: Global System for Mobile communications - an advanced technology based on TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access). Here you need different frequencies in adjacent cells. Usually a cluster of cells is used with each cell operating at a different frequency.
Some more info
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
This is like complaints from some US car companies that their cars didn't sell well in Japan. But they didn't notice that they drive on the left side of the road in Japan, and they tried to sell regular US models...
As I understand it, CDMA costs about 10% of what GSM costs in terms of towers, switches and other related infrastructure. This is a major reason why the US is such a "fan" of CDMA (ignoring for a moment the obvious "MADE IN USA" aspect of US support). That said, the sound quality of CDMA, particularly with respect to transmission delays, is horrible when compared with GSM. Mobile telephones in GSM areas just sound much, much more like land-line telephones than CDMA ones.
CDMA may be a marvelous technology, but it has the unfortunate liability that the service that it delivers to the customer is ridiculously second-rate when compared with GSM. I have used cell phones in the US, and I must say that they are uniformly awful when compared with the GSM system in Europe, for example.
If there was ever a thread where it would be "ok" to threadjack, this would be it.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I got pissed off my nut last night, then got up today and cycled 90km and ran 10km off that.
You're pathetic.
It is the fact that GSM stresses interoperability and the scope of the spec have been major reasons for its success.
Who the hell is this Steven J. Searle and why would anybody take his opinion seriously? Some of his writings are so incredible off base it's insane. Like the US has been saying in the past that the lack of wide spread broad band internet connections is the reason for the extended Japanese recession, give me a break! It's been said by so many ppl that the issue with the Japanese economy has to do with the banking system carrying far too much debt to the point that they no longer can loan money is the core issue. It should obvious to anybody that paid attention in high school that if a banking system can not lend money you can not create wealth. I also love how he references his own opinions, he adds some [#] tag and you would expect a reference right, well when you scroll down you get some more of this dudes opinion, wow I wish that worked for me :P
What the US is pushing is a CDMA system that doesn't communicate with anything else, which is being pushed by Qualcomm (and their senators). CDMA should provide a much better overall quality and spectrum of possible services, unfortunately in the US it doesn't. This is becase the air spec is just a small part of it.
The fun thing is that GSM Phase 3 means that some Qualcomm poatents must be licensed so they are still being paid for the technology.
Four letters:
N T S C
Incidentally, in many parts of the world straight TDMA GSM gives better quality than land-lines because of the digital nature of the network.
I recall that CDMA phones do not have SIM cards and the subscriber number is hardwired into the phone.
Also if you save all your phone numbers on the SIM card, moving to a new phone is as easy as moving your SIM card to the new phone (although with the added functionality of handset phonebooks, this is become less popular).
Considering the effort the US put down on preventing distribution of PGP it serves them right...
Apple built a platform for their ideas, Google built one for everyone's.
When yozu are looking at the financial only, yes CDMA is superuior. But if you look at the quality only, then , sorry but my experience with CDMA was very poor... This is kind of a give-take. I guess that all considered both system are equivalent (none superior).
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It's about USia that wants something but can't get it easily or fast enough, so they're crying and going back to momma (the WTO) to get her to bully the foreign nation they're trying to exploit into submission.
Lucky Japanese though: with poorer or weaker countries that happens to have what USia wants (say, oil), the crying-back-to-momma step is skipped and the other guy gets a punch in the face rightaway.
At a time when the US and Europe were being sold WAP technology, the Japanese developed imode, and gained around 30m users in a couple of short years.
...
WAP never sold well, and people were never convinced of it's merits. End of story - it was superceeded by 3G and ahem, 2.5G. Kind of.
The fact was that imode could never be sold in Europe because the WAP consortium had outlawed packet switching technologies with respective governments' help. Thus the infrastructure was labelled expensive and proprietary (which is exactly what WAP was anyway), and was prevented from being implemented.
The WAP consortium was formed with the expressed purpose of keeping Japanese technology out of Europe and the US, and so we can see the same thing happening here - the Japanese develop a superior technology, so US and European carriers seek to refuse it entry to the market.
Worth remembering next time you go into a mobile phone shop and think "Why hasn't the technology here improved much in the last 5 years?"
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
It's a different generation.
... but not to the extent some of the early propaganda pretended it would be, CDMA was hopelessly overhyped.
It is probably even superior to FDMA/TDMA competitors in it's same generation
How's this a troll? when was the last time you saw the United States play fair on any market without weight-throwing?
Never Twice the Same Colour?
Yep, there is much more overhead in GSM because it does more. Qualcomm frankly make me sick because although they developed CDMA for mobile equipment and promoted it aggressively, they forgot that an air-protocol doesn't make a complete system. Implement a fraction of the protocol and everything is faster, but its better not to switch cells mid-call!!!
As for 'doing the European thing', thats called interoperability, as the rest of the world uses it too. It may be unimportant in the US where only 10% of people have passports but many in the rest of the world do travel.
The reason why I'm sick of this is that I'm aware of an incident where the US threatened to pull a World Bank loan if the country didn't admit a CDMA system which was 100% incompatible with its neighbours.
Why must you americans always fuck around with your own shit instead of using the global standards for telecommunication that exists. First it was TDMA/CDMA vs GSM and now its TD-CDMA vs W-CDMA.
Hey genius... TD-CDMA was mainly developed in East Asia, not the US. Perhaps you are thinking of CDMA2000?
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What I like is that although roaming can cost serious money (20% of outgoing call costs), it is often possible to buy a local SIM card and use the system at local rates. You can then setup a redirect from your old number to the new local number.
The WAP consortium was only seeking a way to get html down a low-bandwith traditional style connection as that is what is available in most of Europe. GPRS (already deployed) and later UMTS make this redundant.
The bulk of Cingular's network is not yet GSM; they're planning on rolling that out, but it pales in comparison to their TDMA network (I should know, I use Cingular).
As to your other point; CDMA horrible? They explain the 500kb/s data throughput that it gets in the Washington DC area.
GSM is a joke for data transfer, and data transfer in the long term will be significantly more important than voice.
Voice is for giggly teenagers.
Yes ure right, was thinking of CDMA2000 from Qualcom. If I call correct this US UMTS system is incompatible with W-CMDA being adopted/deployed by Japan, Europe and Asia.
Not that I personaly care very much if US decides to be incompatible with the rest of the world for political resons. It's just annoying for travelers that Japanese/European phones will not work in the US. This stiffles competion and is sort of a trade-barrier for both European/Asian and US equipment companies.
As a standard overall, GSM is better due to things like the SIM card which let you switch phones easily.
I thought most mobile phone service providers tied the SIM card to the phone for business model reasons. If nobody implements this SIM swapping, what good is it?
In the long run the biggest cost involved is the number of already-deployed sites and phones that are using the older standard. I remember when we got our first taste of GSM it was a painful switchover from AMPS. Coverage was poor and sites were often overloaded.
"we all imagined a groovy peaceful Iraq starting a domino effect of democratisation across the Arab world"
If you believed that Iraq would be groovy, you'll believe that Japan is keeping the US tech sector down with these fake TD-CDMA "obstructions". The only skill BushCo has got is political scams. The sooner they're out of the way, the sooner we can get a manager in office who won't stick his monkey finger into the business of engineers and business developers.
--
make install -not war
I hear it on this thread, but I haven't seen it. What does GSM that CDMA doesn't to make it worth the 10% higher overhead?
I've used all the major systems in the US, and except for coverage issues, there is virtually no difference between the services. The only notable difference I have seen is that GSM doesn't send you the time OTA and thus you have to set the time on your phone.
I have seen nothing that GSM does that CDMA doesn't.
So what is the overhead good for?