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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?"
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
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.
Perhaps, but that was then (when we all imagined a groovy peaceful Iraq starting a domino effect of democratisation across the Arab world), And this is now, when I can't see the mobile phone market in Iraq being very relevant for the next few years.
This is more akin to how the US has berated china over keeping its currency artifically low against the Dollar, while doing the same thing to Europe.
Or the Way the US has slammed the EU's fine against Microsoft as the 'opening shot of a trade war', While ignoring its own illegal subsidies and tariffs which have been in place for years.
The saying was, 'war is an extension of politics by other means', Today it has an addition of... " And, Politics is an extension of economics by other means".
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...
Now that would mean serious problems for the US economy. Serious enough to start a war, in fact.
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 confusing the quality of the technology with the quality of a cellphone company's network. I find European GSM quality much better than US GSM quality.
CDMA is a better technology than GSM. Period. But does that matter? The end-user cares about making & recieving phone calls, not the backend technology.
It is the fact that GSM stresses interoperability and the scope of the spec have been major reasons for its success.
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.
It's common that countries that lose a war are forbidden by treaties to build and army for a certain time. I would assume this goes for Japan after WW2 as well.
So it wasn't really that they depended on a US army to protect them but that they were not allowed to have one. After they had been doing this for a few decades and become one of the leading countries in the process I assmume they discovered that it was quite a lot better to have a lot of research and tech instead of a military so why stop doing it?
It should be possible to mod a link down. This Skytel page is the most blatent pseudo-scientific propaganda I have come around in a long time.
How can true nerds accept a phrase like: "Well in this page we do not see a need of detailed explanation of technical specifications of CDMA and GSM, which, frankly, few of us really can understand." What an insult to the readers intelligence. There is nothing complicated about cellular telephony that people who know what they are talking about cannot explain to folks with basic high school physics background.
However, CDMA technology checks 800 times per second its transmission level. Therefore, radiation level is 10 times less than AMPS and GSM. Smart, isn't it?
The output power levels have nothing to do with the speed of the power control loop. GSM and CDMA2k alike adjusts the output power according to the signal quality at the base-station, GSM transmits in short bursts, CDMA2k transmits continuously, the average power is comparable and in a well covered network with small cells boths systems will transmit power far below the max power level anyway.