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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
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
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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.
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.
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.
Incidentally, in many parts of the world straight TDMA GSM gives better quality than land-lines because of the digital nature of the network.
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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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
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.
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.
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.
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.