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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!
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
...
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.