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Google Pulls Support For CDMA Devices
An anonymous reader writes "Google has just made some interesting changes to their developer pages. As of today, all of the documentation, source code, and firmware images pertaining to CDMA Android devices (including the Verizon Galaxy Nexus) have been removed. A statement from Google explains that the proprietary software required to make these devices fully functional got in the way of Android's open source nature, so CDMA devices are no longer supported as developer hardware. What does this mean for the Galaxy Nexus, which is only available as CDMA in the U.S.?"
How widespread is the use of CDMA in the first place?
I guess this means Sprint, who has been pushing Android phones very aggressively for the past 3 years, is left out in the cold too?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Sounds to me like the carriers and Google butted heads on some code, and this is Google putting the pressure on the carriers to open up parts of their software, but that is purely speculation on my part. I'm just curious how this is going to play out with Sprint's rollout of the LTE Google Nexus.
Last I looked, it is Sprint & Verizon. AT&T & T-Mobile being GSM.
But this sounds strange - Google is just handing over Verizon's & Sprint's customer bases over to Apple, Microsoft and others? Why not just work w/ Qualcomm, and put in a more restrictive OSS license, and continue to support those devices, rather than abandon a good portion of the market, one of whom is the leader in 4G in the US?
The Galaxy Nexus will continue to work just fine on CDMA. For future models, well, that's another story... Google forces the industry to either open up their firmware or move on to GSM. Good thing, IMO.
The GSM standards as originally developed were deliberately chosen to work on bands (900 MHz , IIRC) that in the US were assigned to the military. That is, to be initially incompatible and unusable in the US, so as to split the world into "US" and "rest", and give non-US developers a head start. It worked ...
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
To answer the question "What does this mean for the Galaxy Nexus, which is only available as CDMA in the U.S.?". My understanding is there will still be the HSPA+ version, made for GSM networks, available in the USA, and that Google will continue to support it.
And only for some features. Consumer phones will of course still be fully supported, receive all updates etc.
AOSP builds from source have never had full telephony function for CDMA devices due to missing carrier binaries, so Google is moving to clarify this, and is no longer listing CDMA devices as fully supported for developers.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
In Japan, they also have W-CDMA (UMTS), but at least the phones there typically use uSIM cards, which just happen to be similar to GSM SIM cards.
I can take any unlocked phone that supports UMTS, and put in any uSIM card from any other the 3 major carriers (softbank, au, & docomo) and it will work.
However in the USA, CMDA based carriers refused to allow any type of uSIM support for their networks, since they want users to be locked down to their networks. Even if you paid the extra $$$ for an unlocked iPhone 4S, you cannot get it work on both Sprint and Verizon the networks. The iPhone unlock is only for GSM not CDMA in the USA. The same is also true for Android phones as well.
I am very happy to see Google finally stand up against the horrible CMDA situation in the USA. As previous commenters have stated, it would be nice if either CMDA went away, or they followed the example of Japan, and are required to have uSIM cards.
The goal should be to have every unlocked smart-phone unlocked and able to work with every carrier, but simply inserting a SIM/uSIM card. Personally I think it is horrible that smart-phones are not required to be unlocked, since these phones are typically not subsidized with 2-3 year contacts that covers the full cost of the phone many times over.
The problem that I've always had w/ SIM cards is that they have only a fraction of the capabilities of one's main phone. On the phone, if you are storing the different numbers of a person, as long as you are storing it in the phone memory, you can, under his/her name, store Main#, Home#, Work#, Cell# and Pager#, However, if you wanted to save something like that on a SIM, the SIM would take it down as 5 different numbers, and looking @ them, one wouldn't have a clue.
In between, I used to notice some stores carry flash memory cards w/ a SIM form factor - think Sandisk made them. What exactly were they - could one use them as SIMs, albeit w/ memory to do the things mentioned above? I notice that they seem to have disappeared from the market.
Anyway, having a SIM that one can switch b/w phones is a good thing, but if moving the well organized phone#s will be a pain, I honestly don't see the advantage. I wonder whether the RUIMs in CDMA phones get over this limitation, or are they still hamstrung by it? If this capability was there, then CDMA would genuinely be a better alternative to GSM. I do prefer CDMA myself, since the voice quality and reception is generally better, and I typically don't use phones to access the internet, nor do I think wireless modems are an economical way of surfing the internet, as opposed to Wi-Fi.
This is a bit disappointing to me, or maybe I just don't see the point? I can't forsee the carriers opening up their network infrastructure, getting qualcomm to open up their chipsets, or a move to GSM for these major CDMA carriers any time soon. With these options not possible I don't know what the point of this is (feel free to enlighten me). In the mean time we see damage to the value of the Android platform on the two best networks for Android owners. 1) Sprint has been a major player in the Android ecosystem, one of the early adopters (right alongside T-Mobile) and having rolled out the most cutting edge hardware and largest bevy of phones ahead of the others. They are also the only partner network for Google Wallet in the US. 2) Verizon, while a much more closed network, offers the fastest and most widespread 4G LTE network. Android power users (with a little cash to burn) flock to Android phones on this network for blazing speeds on the go. A frequent techies commuter dream. On the other hand, we have T-Mobile who has been limping along with the (in comparison to the other networks) under powered variant of the GS2 and no plans for the Galaxy Nexus at this time. We also have AT&T who hasn't been doing too badly but does not roll out near as many Android devices as any of the other networks, has been rated worst in customer serivce, tends to focus on their iPhone sales, and has encountered frequent network capacity issues. Just doesn't make sense to me right now.
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Google isn't "Dropping" CDMA support. CDMA Android phones aren't going anywhere any time soon - they're just not supporting them as DEVELOPER devices. Due to issues with Custom ROMs not working as best they could (due to the proprietary components required), Google is basically saying that the CDMA Nexus phones are no better than any other non-nexus device when it comes to "official" developer support. They'll still exist, they'll still be sold, updated, etc. but they won't be classed as "Developer devices". That's it.
This isn't anything new, it was the same case with the Nexus S 4G and even the Xoom.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I don't know about that. From a signal encoding and processing point of view, I've always seen CDMA mobile protocols superior over GSM protocols. The only major drawback I've seen to CDMA, and it's not a little one, is its lack of resilience when large group of people get together (events, shows, stadiums, etc.). The MTSO becomes quickly overloaded and instead of quality degradation, you start to have full service loss.
I'm sure there are many reason while in the end GSM is better and more widely implemented. Just like VHS was better than Beta. Perhaps GSM is cheaper, but that's just speculation on my part. What this news post clearly shows, is that there are license issues with CDMA, and that alone reminds me of the Beta vs. VHS debate.
Superiority is a very relative notion.
A few minutes of googling would probably bring me up to speed on the telecom acronyms, but I always thought AT&T and TMobile used GSM and all of the faster technologies were built on top of the GSM framework... EDGE, HSDPA and stuff like that. Similarly, I believed Sprint and Verizon use CDMA based technology and built subsequent enhancements on top of those.
Here's where my confusion comes in though. Looking at my phone, I go to "Menu" -> "Settings" -> "Wireless and network" -> "Mobile networks" -> "Network mode" and I see three options. One is GSM/WCDMA (Auto mode), another is GSM only and the last is WCDMA only. So now I'm curious about what's going on here.
I'm packing up for a road trip right now but I hope to come back here and someone who knows what they are talking about will spell it out in simple, understandable terms for me, because clearly, I don't know what I thought I knew.
Which do you think is stronger, the provider who keeps customers by locking them in or the provider who keeps customers by providing superior service? Which is the better customers, those who stay with you because they are trapped or those who stay with you because they like you?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
...for an Android device that I won't be able to use for development purposes moving forward? It was supposed to be the defacto phone for Google support. If this is true, I'm a little (more than) disappointed. Feels like a bait and switch from my perspective, even if technically it may not be.
You're close. GSM won the worldwide competition for a few reasons, but technical superiority was not one of them.You can see that in the fact that UMTS as successor to GSM actually reuses a lot of stuff from CDMA.
1) GMS network architecture is a lot more simple, meaning you can set up the whole operating environment faster and cheaper
2) GSM is more robust when handling many handsets in the same area
3) GSM radio equipment was a lot cheaper, simply a) due to simpler technology, the individual base station controllers needed less power and b) because it was much more widespread in the early stages and manufactured in higher quantities (ironically, the major reason for that was actually that in the major cities, analog mobile phones in the US worked a lot better than in europe, so the pressure to quickly build up digital cell networks was a lot higher)
Why does this sound like the decision to allow udev to separate the loadable module from the proprietary firmware? Sound to me like Google is doing nothing more than saying, "You have to pay the license fees to include the firmware for CDMA."
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Maybe it is the details of the licensing that differ between CDMA and GSM. The devil uses details as hiding places, ya know. I suspect Google hates having the OS tainted with having to handle proprietary stuff.
I'd rather have a fully open platform. However, I can accept a platform with well isolated sections where things like firmware to drive parts like the RF section do not need to involve the primary smart apps section where open innovation needs to play. But this does mean the proprietary sections need to have their firmware images stored and loadable from there, not from the OS. Then an app can be used to load the firmware, and the proprietary section can validate the firmware image signatures (every time it loads it from flash, too).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Actually, Beta was technically better than VHS. When I had to switch to VHS I noticed the quality difference. But VHS won because Sony decided to charge the movie companies a royalties. The effect was that the new movies came out on VHS, and only showed up on Beta after market experience suggested that it might be worth paying the royalties for a later Beta version. It didn't take long for consumers to notice that new releases were on VHS, and Beta lost the game entirely.
Both Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, and account for many millions of Android phone users. Does Google's move mean no more upgrades to their existing phones? And no new phones for them?
Maybe 3G and 4G aren't "CDMA" as Google defines them. Or maybe this move is a temporary restructuring. Or maybe it's Google forcing some concession from Verizon and Sprint, either in CDMA licensing or something else. Because I can't see the wisdom of Google just cutting off the majority of its US smartphone users.
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make install -not war
I seriously doubt it was done with the intention of locking US providers out of the GSM market. Besides, I can't think of any reason you couldn't run GSM technology on different frequency spectrums, and I know for a FACT that many nations do so. You just need to have custom hardware built for the market, and that would cost FAR less than supporting entirely different CDMA hardware to cater to big US telcos that are too tight-fisted to invest in their infrastructure but prefer to let customers put up with dropped and lost calls because they HAVE LITTLE TO NO CHOICE in the matter.
"Competition"? What competition? Every single one of the US vendors in the Delaware area REFUSED to upgrade their cell hardware, especially Verizon, who only upgraded the Wilmington area itself and left the rest of the state behind the times for YEARS while I lived there.
Hell, when DSL was available throughout every place I'd lived for the past decade, I had to dig out my old 56.6Kbps modem while in Delaware, and because Verizon was so tight fisted on their landline infrastructure as well, I could only get 28.8 connections!
The US is WAY BEHIND THE WORLD when it comes to telecommunications because of the profit-hungry oligopoly.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
There probably has been a lot of whining in back channels about custom ROM's being created which strip out carrier crap.
Additionally there is the Motorola deal... umm... Motorola is one of the LARGEST CDMA licensees....hmmmm..
Something more is afoot, and the lack of transparency , probably due to the BS NDA's etc. is just annoying.
1311393600 - Back to Black
And the cellphone analogy is that Qualcomm is the "Sony" here. Qualcomm owns all the patents related to CDMA technology and has proven to be an I.P. bully to both its customers and its competitors.
This /. article is actually about a pissing match between Google and Qualcomm.
You are aware that CDMA is technologically superiour to GSM in EVERY way.
Care to explain why/how? For those of us who aren't aware?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
CDMA as a multiplexing technology is superior to TDMA.
CDMA is not superior to GSM, which happens to use TDMA.
Hmmm, the CDMA standard for the 1900 MHz band was published in 1995, and the first GSM network operating in the 1900 MHz band was launched in the USA in the same year.
Finally
You're close. GSM won the worldwide competition for a few reasons, but technical superiority was not one of them.You can see that in the fact that UMTS as successor to GSM actually reuses a lot of stuff from CDMA.
Yeah, it uses this thing called "Code Division Multiple Access", which I think comes from CDMA :-). I don't know what stuff UMTS took from cdmaONE/CDMA2000 other than the notion of using Code Division Multiple Access.
AT&T and T-Mobile have areas where their coverage sucks, its a fact.
Well it sure took them long enough! Glad to hear they finally did some investment instead of just bilking the customers. Maybe they finally listened to the (literally) hundreds of people who were complaining about the lack of high-speed service in Delaware (and that was just the departments and programmers I dealt with personally at one company!)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.