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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?"
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
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The standard mentioned in the article is a mix of TDMA and CDMA. It uses CDMA in a half-duplex fashion, with transmission lengths limited to predefined time slots.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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
No, CDMA is not on it's way out. CDMA is actually far superior to GSM (IMHO). Actually the commercial implementation of CDMA happened after GSM (CDMA was used by the US military before) which is probaby why most of Asia adopted GSM since that was the cutting-edge technology of that time. Now, both GSM and CDMA (IS-95) are 2G (second generation) technologies. Guess what's 3G? WCDMA (wideband-CDMA) and CDMA-2000. So CDMA is definitely not on its way out.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
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)
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.
You are correct. However, it should be said that CMDA vs GSM is an apples and oranges comparison. CDMA is a radio protocol. GSM is a full mobile phone standard of which a radio protocol is just one component. GSM is based on TDMA radio technology, which is outdated by now. The positive point of GSM is that it defines the featureset, including voice (with all the trimmings), data/fax, and sms, as well as concepts like the SIM chip (keeps identity and phone separated), and even the audio codec! This ambitious featureset and level of compatibility is what allowed GSM to dominate most of the world. Of course, like most standards, GSM hasn't really changed in the last 10 years (although lately there have been some add-ons, like GPRS).
Even so, GSM has withstood the test of time. Some companies in the USA tried to build their own competing systems (using the same radio protocol, TDMA), but they paled in comparison to GSM. Even many CDMA implementations (ie, Sprint, Verizon) have lagged seriously behind GSM's featureset, despite being based on a better radio protocol. Today, CDMA implementations have surpassed GSM capabilities in many areas (wireless data throughput comes to mind), but until I see Verizon using SIM chips, it is safe to say that GSM isn't going anywhere.
The next generation of mobile technology will simply be improvements to GSM concepts. We'll hopefully continue the trend of network standardization with a solid featureset and a SIM-like identity mechanism, but with an upgraded (CDMA-based) radio protocol.
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.
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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
CDMA is both a mobile phone standard (IS-95) and a technology (Code Division Multiple Access) and if you're comparing "GSM" to "TDMA" to "CDMA" then you're refering to phone standards. CDMA the phone standard is junk, in all honesty, and is being phased out. The direct replacement for it is CDMA2000, which existing US IS-95 operators like Sprint PCS and Verizon are moving to.
CDMA the technology is rather better and is being used in a number of newer systems. GSM "version 2" is called UMTS, and has a configurable air interface which can be GSM's Time Division Multiple Access, EDGE (a more modern and efficient Time Division MA system), or a variant of Code Division Multiple Access (ie the CDMA the technology, not CDMA the mobile phone standard) called WCDMA, depending on the operator's preferences.
Only CDMA2000 is based upon CDMA the standard. UMTS is based upon GSM. TD-CDMA is a completely new system and isn't based upon anything. It does use "CDMA the technology", but it certainly isn't related in any way, shape, or form to IS-95.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Not exactly.. those providers selling DISCOUNT phones, you know, for "free" or for "$5" when you purchase your SIM.... in a package deal, will have the phone locked to only read sims from that provider. That means that if the provider is regional, and all your friends also have phones from the same provider... you can still swap phones all you like.
You can still take your SIM and use it in any unrestricted GSM phone.
It's not like open GSM phones are hard to find either.. basically every cellular shop is full of them. The locked ones are just cheaper, that's all.