Slashdot Mirror
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.?"
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.
It's used in the US, where they are 20 years behind the rest of the world in mobile phones.
Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. Now that it's all being ripped out and replaced with 3G there's a lot of GSM hardware on the second-hand market. It's not even expensive.
Make things easy on yourselves. Take that giant leap into the year 2000.
India has a CDMA network as well.
Jonathanjk.com
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.
Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. ... Take that giant leap into the year 2000.
What are you talking about? GSM has been available in the U.S. since before 2000. It's not our fault some carriers hold onto CDMA. But really, you can't blame them when it worked perfectly well for their purposes. Me, I think a lot of it was to make it more difficult for people to use second-hand phones, since you can't just swap your service from one phone to another on your own like you can GSM.
How widespread is the use of CDMA in the first place?
That depends what you mean. The old 2G GSM is TDMA (time division multiple access), whereas the modern 3G UMTS used in most of the world is CDMA - Code division multiple access.
Fortunately TFA refers to a particular CDMA implementation used in the US (CDMA2000), and not the much more common UMTS version, or CDMA in general.
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
Come on, America, at least move onto GSM.
Yeah, AT&T's pages don't mention GSM very much - they keep going on about some "LTE" thing. Hopefully they'll be upgrading from that weird technology to standard GSM some day....
(Yes, I know. The early noughts called, they want their snark about the US mobile phone network back....)
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"?
Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. Now that it's all being ripped out and replaced with 3G there's a lot of GSM hardware on the second-hand market. It's not even expensive.
You do know that the 3G you are referring to is also known as Wideband CDMA or W-CDMA, right?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Except that East Asian deployments of CDMA2000 use SIM for network authentication - changing phones in Japan, Korea, or India is as simple as moving a little smartcard around. Just like in GSM. Don't hold me to it, but it might also apply to CDMA2000 networks in Eastern Europe.
Only in the Americas do CDMA2000 networks still use MEID for authentication, as far as I know.
I know that CDMA is an older standard, however, from what I remember it has always had better voice quality and tower transfers than GSM.
The one big advantage of GSM is the use of SIM cards, and that simultaneous voice and data were possible. CDMA also has better spectral efficiency than TDMA used by GSM. Check out Wikipedia's article on it and look at the efficiency of the latest CDMA vs GSM standard.
Don't act like the carriers stuck with CDMA to be dinosaurs. It actually was , at least for voice users, the better technology.
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 only 2 CDMA carriers are Reliance and Tata Indicom, but both offer GSM plans as well. In the 3G space (India is nowhere near 4G), Reliance promotes their GSM plans (their CDMA is still 2.5G), while Tata has stopped promoting Indicom, and promotes Tata DoCoMo instead, which is a GSM standard, but one in which Japan's DoCoMo has a share.
Its used in India for low budget high volume users
And for USB data cards
Theres MTS also
And Tata Photon/Photon+ and Reliance data cards have CDMA and GSM variants, but its the CDMA variants that are actually affordable
CDMA had better coverage in Australia outside of metropolitan areas, and when it was turned off to free up spectrum for the 3G network it was a big step backwards for a lot of people. Either the situation has improved since then or the affected population has given up complaining about it. I'm pretty sure the last CDMA cell was turned off here a while back.
I'm always confused when people talk about GSM though, as i've heard 3G referred to as a GSM protocol but 3G is just an evolution of CDMA... I guess we're stuck with the terminology though.
Only in the Americas do CDMA2000 networks still use MEID for authentication, as far as I know.
So... you're agreeing with me then? Yes, perhaps there are some versions of CDMA that have the flexibility of SIMs, but that's not what the U.S. carriers deployed. That still jives with my idea the choice was entirely deliberate to help carriers maintain control of hardware (and customers) and boost contract re-ups, etc.
It's just another method of creating artificial business barriers in an increasingly small world. Like region encoding DVDs and the U.S. adopting ATSC for HD broadcasting instead of using DVB-T or ISDB.
3G just means 3rd generation. So while W-CDMA is a 3rd generation network technology, it does not mean that all 3rd generation technology is W-CDMA.
Yeah, US mobile phone companies like Apple, Motorola, RIM, and Palm are just decades behind European mobile phone companies, like Nokia, and... umm...
It's funny how the US takes so much crap for being incompatible, when really, the US is usually the first-mover, and it's the "rest of the world" that decides to develop something intentionally incompatible, for no good reason. Witness ATSC versus DVB.
Oh, and did I mention Vodaphone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless, which is the major CDMA carrier? If CDMA is a liability, then it's a British plot to keep the US down...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And wasn't CDMA a step backwards from AMPS, which was turned off in 2000? Apparently.
The "3G" UMTS (and even 4G like LTE) networks use W-CDMA on the air interface, but talk GSM protocols. The CDMA ideas were much superior than TDMA as used by GSM, at a cost of more CPU computations required.
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
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.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
Google is just handing over Verizon's & Sprint's customer bases over to Apple, Microsoft and others?
Good Thing you added a question mark because this doesn't mean Google is handing anything over to anyone. Google and Carriers are still more then welcome to use CDMA technology all they like and are free to do anything they want with the phones as long as all the licensing requirements of all the software they use are met. Google removing CDMA from the developer pages is not the same thing as Google saying that the android license and therefor anyone using the android software is now restricted from using CDMA and it can no longer be used because that is not what it means. It means Google is having issues complying with certain licenses by posting the CDMA specs online and therefor they have simply taken it out of the open space where anyone in the world is now able to access it but carriers like Verizon and Sprint and Manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, LG, etc, etc will have no problem obtaining the resources and permissions to develop and implement the CDMA functionality and I'm willing to bet that Google will not only make it easy to load this functionality in a modular way which will ease integration but I also bet that will be aiding with the design and development to these companies to make sure it's done. Don't misinterpret Google taking CDMA from the open developer pages as meaning anything even close to saying Google is not going to allow CDMA on Android phones anymore because one example I can think of already is Sprint, a CDMA provider, has the contract to deploy Galaxy Nexus phones as soon as the exclusivity rights for Verizon finish. People shouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly based on a gross over simplification of what is actually being said without taken a moment to read it thoroughly and make an effort to understand the real implications of the actions. Hope this answers your question.
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.
Storing contact info on the SIM is best treated as a secondary, legacy function. For any more complicated set of personal data you're better off exporting it in some standard-ish format your new phone can handle, or syncing it via some external service. Also, at least all the HTC Android phones I've seen seem to have no difficulty pulling the data from other devices via Bluetooth.
Being able to switch providers or phones by moving SIMs is worth even inputting the contact data manually, imo.
Your parent poster is right. Things are just "different", only in the US, because of the "why should I?" mentality. Also, your list of US companies supposedly ahead of the game is half moot: RIM is a Canadian company, Apple isn't involved in developing mobile technology - just integrating it, and Palm has never really took of.
Well there's that, but these days, people are becoming increasingly accustomed to high priced phones and changing them out when new models come out. I don't like the trend, but it is what it is. My old Sansung Vibrant was and still is a great phone with its being rooted and having custom firmware. My Samsung Titanium hasn't been rooted yet and has bloatware and all that crap still... (Holding out hope for an ICS upgrade OTA which is supposed to be "any day now" right?) I'll probably get tired of waiting, root and install a custom ROM pretty soon, but wait! A new Galaxy S III is to be announced in June... should I be getting ready to buy that? Consumer instinct says yes.
> and it's the "rest of the world" that decides to develop something intentionally incompatible, for no good reason. Witness ATSC versus DVB.
Rubbish. On both counts.
GSM was in development in the late 1980s, by a range of European telecom companies, and was first deployed in 1991. CDMA was developed by one American company (Qualcomm), and was first deployed in 1995. American network operators picked CDMA partly because it's American, and partly because it was slightly better than GSM in rural areas, where you have large areas with very low population density. Cost cutting, basically - it allowed them to have better coverage while having fewer towers. Not a problem in Europe, though.
Australia had a CDMA network until fairly recently, mostly for rural areas. The operator killed it when they depolyed their 3G GSM-based network because the 3G version of GSM does not have that advantage. It's quite possible to replace a CDMA network with a 3G GSM one - after all, all the phones are by definition provided on contract, and you're generally providing new phones every few years anyway. It's just that no American network chose to do so.
If I had to guess, a lot of that would be because of SIM cards, and the fact that you can use pretty much any phone on a GSM network. I doubt they're preferring CDMA to prevent international roaming.
As for ATSC... It was in development first, yes, but only slightly. However, DVB systems were deployed long before equivalent ATSC systems. At best, it's a wash. You could argue that Europe should have adopted ATSC instead, but in practice DVB systems were in use before ATSC was even finalized.
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.
Actually on Verizon switching phones is as easy as calling an activation number and waiting about 2 minutes for your old phone to be disconnected and your new one to be set up. The last time I had a GSM phone about 5 years ago service was widely unavailable in many rural parts of the Mid-Atlantic region and its still impossible to get GSM signal in underground areas (parking garages, basements, certain bars, etc.)
T-Mobile also operates a UMTS IV (AWS) aka wcdma2000 network. Here in Vancouver (and other parts of Canada), we have two carriers that use this network; WInd and Mobilicity. They also operate the only network that doesn't have what I call, "rape my asshole till it bleeds" data rates. On the GSM providers, $45/month minimum and you get 100MB of data : On the AWS guys, $35/month for unlimited talk/text/data from Mobilicity and $29 from Wind (though after 10GB with them your speed goes down to 256Kbit). On a related personal note, I just grabbed a wcdma Nexus One and this is really fucking annoying. I hate Canadian cell phone networks!
GSM has a fixed maximum cell size - 20km radius at first, later extended to 35km. CDMA doesn't have a maximum. GSM does because it uses time division multiplexing - several phones can transmit and receive on the same frequency, and they take turns. The further from the tower your phone is, the longer the signal takes to travel back and forth, and there comes a point where your transmissions spill into the next slot, reducing call quality for whoever's using it. If you get to that distance from the tower, it will just drop the call. The maximum cell size is a tradeoff between how much equipment the network needs to serve a given area and how much spectrum it would have to use.
In densely-populated places like most of Europe, the maximum cell size isn't really an issue - there aren't many places where you can leave one settlement and travel 20km without entering another. Australia and North America, on the other hand, are much more spread out, and the number of GSM cells that would be needed to provide acceptable coverage to rural areas would be too expensive for the likely revenue from them.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
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.
It's used in the US, where they are 20 years behind the rest of the world in mobile phones.
Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. Now that it's all being ripped out and replaced with 3G there's a lot of GSM hardware on the second-hand market. It's not even expensive.
But CDMA has at least one major advantage: When your phone rings, it does not destroy any recordings being made in the same room (the way a GSM cell phone does).
Actually, I work in a lab that programs, tests, and services phones on all four carriers. You are absolutely correct in your statement! Sprint and Verizon both were using CDMA for that reason. Verizon has now switched to LTE for quite a bit of it's network but Sprint is still using a combination of CDMA and WiMax. While AT&T and T-Mobile were using GSM but have now mostly switched to HSDPA(HSPA+) and LTE respectively.
What most people don't realize is that none of the technologies that are currently out can truly be called 4G! Unlike 3G, there is no specific standard for what is considered 4G service yet. The industry is saying that these specifications are in development, but right now 4G is more of a gimmick to get consumers to buy the latest and greatest thing! 2G service came out around 1995, 3G came out around 2005. Mobile infrastructures, in the USA at least, seem to be on a ten year cycle. With that said there most likely will not be a "4G standard" till around 2015. Sprint actually has the most right to call it's network 4G, not because of speed, but because it is the 4th generation of it's network.
I love ignorant fools opening their mouths. They make asses of themselves and don't even realize it.
You are aware that CDMA is technologically superiour to GSM in EVERY way. In fact, CDMA is most comparable to WCDMA/UMTS, as they're both 3G technologies and WCDMA/UMTS in fact borrowed heavily from CDMA for their air interface. GSM is the most widly deployed network architecture, true, but don't think for a second it's because it's superior. It's because it's cheap. Period.
The USA was the first to roll out 2G, half went with CDMA, half went with GSM. The GSM crowd because it was an international standard, and the CDMA crowd because it was far superior to GSM, and cost wasn't that different because GSM had yet to have wide spread deployment to drive cost down. As time went on though, since CDMA is heavily patented by Qualcomm, it meant the price stayed high when the rest of the world started rolling out their networks, so they went with the cheaper GSM.
I also have a theory that part of GSMs adoption in europe is due to a very "europe first" mentality, and due to strong american ties to CDMA, they didn't want to go that way, but again, just a theory on my part, and the cost probably was the bigger motivator.
Lastly, CDMA as deployed in the USA is a 3G technology, why ditch it for a 2G network? At least tell us to ditch it and go with UMTS. Oh, and the US also has every one of those technologies deployed. AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM/UMTS networks, Verizon and Sprint are CDMA networks. And everybody seems to be heading to LTE for 4G networks.
-A cellular network R&D engineer.
According to Wikipedia (and its cited sources), the 4G spec was finalized in 2008, and would require the ability for sustained data rates of 100Mbps. Current networks don't meet that, but LTE-Advanced could, and is only a firmware upgrade removed from current LTE systems.
Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#Requirements and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMT_Advanced
Sig? What's that? Oh, 'signature'...and it's supposed to be witty? Right...
"It's just another method of creating artificial business barriers in an increasingly small world. Like region encoding DVDs and the U.S. adopting ATSC for HD broadcasting instead of using DVB-T or ISDB."
You really don't know what you're talking about.
If you had ever served on a standards committee, you would know that competing standards are not
a plot to screw the consumer, but are the result of an inability of people from different countries to
agree on things.
"How widespread is the use of CDMA in the first place?"
60%+ of US subs are CDMA.
The inferior GSM is used by crApTT, TnoMobile and a few regional nobodies.
"Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. "
GSM is DEAD, and has been surpassed by UMTS and I've got news for you.
UMTS uses.... wait for it... WCDMA!
HA! So hate elsewhere dude.
LTE is closely related to GSM & UMTS as it uses the existing backend systems for GSM/UMTS, and there is an easy upgrade path for CDMA carriers for the backends, but LTE is OFDMA and more closely related to CDMA and WCDMA of UMTS than GSM's old GMSK on the RF side.
CDMA also has several RF and spectrum benefits that GSM do not.
1311393600 - Back to Black
They're not US, I know, but SaskTel actually supports CDMA, GSM, and another protocol I'd never heard of before. So dropping CDMA support shouldn't be an issue for me.
SaskTel alway has been a leader in technology amongst Canada's phone and cell providers, because their market is small enough that they can deploy the technology to the province without a 5-10 year rollout plan that bigger districts like Ontario, Quebec, or BC require. Manitoba's telephone company breathes hard down SaskTel's neck, though.
Alberta seems to be a bit of a mess without any one complete provincial coverage company available. I don't know what the situation is in any of the eastern provinces.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What a crock of shit. Stop making excuses for the tightwad US telcos that refuse to invest in infrastructure.
You can't get any more spread out than Saskatchewan with 1,000,000-odd people (and we are odd!) in a province this size, yet 98% of our province is covered by SaskTel's GSM network, and was covered in under 5 years once they decided to upgrade from the old analogue cell systems they used to have.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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
Often a trend isn't obvious until it's peaking, and on the verge of being stale (or outright untenable).
.
In 3 years from now, I just can't imagine people will still be paying $1500/year for a phone + service. It's a lot of money!
Granted, it's paying for a massive infrastructure buildup. I keep waiting for a price war on low-end service, for people who only need 5% of the bandwidth an average iPhone user will consume. Like, 200 minutes of talk + unlimited texting for $30/month. But it isn't happening.
Can someone explain why CDMA inherently forbids SIM cards or an analogous device that lets you move your account over to any old compatible phone without the telecom getting involved?
I'm looking for a technical reason, not "money money money".
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Saskatchewan has an overall population density of 4.6 people/mile^2, but the population is absolutely not uniformly distributed. 98% coverage must be of 'subscribers' rather than area. The actual coverage (pdf) is just of the major southern cities and roads.
Contrast this with, say, Eastern KY with a population density of 14 people/mile^2 (county dependent) that is more uniformly distributed. CDMA coverage is sketchy, and GSM is a bad joke. The maximum range of the signal is what makes it economical to service this area, and even then barely so.
Personally, I was wanting my next phone to be a Nexus so I wouldn't have to deal with carrier BS, but it looks like that's not a realistic option anymore. GSM is spotty in the whole state and nearly useless outside the major cities.
I know. To think that if we had only made the RIGHT choice I could have been completely unable to buy my N900!
Vendor locked devices! No carrier mobility! The SUPERIOR way!
It doesn't forbid it, as I recall. It makes it optional and virtually every carrier opted not to as it gives them more control over the handsets.
So CDMA2000 is going to take the glory for the use of WCDMA as base for UMTS? If someone wins an olympic medal, I am sure the winner's brother cannot claim he won...
GSM is only dead as far as 2G is dead; 90% of the world use GSM for 2G. The U.S. "consultants" were laughed at when they wanted to establish CDMA2000 as the Iraqi mobile network after the takeover...
You're making excuses: http://dslprime.com/a-wireless-cloud/61-w/4466-us-wireless-75-fewer-basestations-than-comparable-europe
You have no comprehension of how badly US telcos underinvest in their networks. In 2007 AT&T was building less towers than T-Mobile while ignoring their engineers' warnings about the network meltdown their actions would cause.
No, it's actually far far far more fragmented than that. It's not anywhere near the GSM market crying and picking up CDMA. Read up, it'll help you. Here's a good start, and you can extend your knowledge into more technical realms once you get the basics down: http://gizmodo.com/5637136/giz-explains-gsm-vs-cdma
Actually, a large part of the problem is that "CDMA" is used as a term to describe two different things:
When people talk about "CDMA" phones, they usually mean it in the second sense, so they don't consider UMTS phones "CDMA" phones, the fact that, when running on a UMTS network, they use Code Division Multiple Access, in the form of W-CDMA, nonwithstanding.
The article you point to uses it in both senses; for example, it says
where the last sentence uses it in the latter sense, and also says
which uses it in the former sense. They barely mention UMTS, and don't bother mentioning that UMTS also "[layers] digitized calls over one another, and unpack them on the back end with sequence codes".
So, no, the GSM market didn't "pick up CDMA" in the sense of dumping all the GSM protocols in favor of the cdmaONE/CDMA2000 protocols. It did, however, "pick up CDMA" in the sense that the UMTS follow-on to GSM uses Code Division Multiple Access.
CDMA was the first technology to enable "reuse 1" deployment.
In a GSM network, you need to use several frequencies to deploy one layer of the network, so that a cell doesn't interfere with a close cell. Using 7 frequencies for example allows a cell and all its immediate neighbor cells (using an hexagonal paving) to have different frequencies. Then the the closest cell with the same frequency is not adjacent but one hop further, and its interference is reduced.
In a CDMA network, all cells in a layer can use the same frequency. Now a mobile close to its cell where the signal is high is fine, but a mobile far from its cell and hence close to another neighbor cell will suffer interference. But this can be mitigated. In CDMA the bandwidth is split between codes, and neighbor can share the code space without trampling on each other feet and creating undue interference. There's still interference at the edge, and for a give frequency the cell capacity is lower than in GSM. But now you could use the 7 frequencies of GSM to provide 7 layers instead of a single one. And you gain in total capacity. In other words, reuse 1 reduce the capacity for a single frequency, but allows maximizing the usage of each frequency, and maximizing the network capacity. That's what got every operator so excited.
This being said, CDMA as deployed in CDMA2000/EVDO networks is now pretty backward and expansive. That's why all US CDMA operators are so eager to move to LTE and leave it behind. HSPA+ is much better, and what is amusing is that it kind of move away from the CDMA tenets to introduce back TDM principles (GSM is TDM based). HSPA+ is still CDMA based, but instead of transmitting over a few codes for a long time (as initially done with CDMA), it transmits for a short duration and use most codes. And multiplexing is done over time (as in TDM). Because it turns out that this is most efficient.
Anyway, you can safely ignore fanboys of either GSM or CDMA. It's our past. The future is now and is OFDMA, as used first by WiMAX and now LTE. It also allows for reuse 1 deployments, but instead of handling allocation based on time only (GSM), or on time and codes (CDMA), it handles allocations based on frequency and time. The bandwidth is split in many small carriers (15 kHz spacing in LTE for example). Carriers are groups in bunches (a resource block in LTE is 12 carriers for example). And you allocate several RBs to a device for a subframe of 1 ms. Allocation can change each subframe.
What's the gain of OFDMA? Better handling of multipath. When you're cell phone receive the signal from the base station, it actually receives a "main path" and several echoes due to reflexions on buildings, etc. Also, the higher the bandwidth the shortest the elementary symbol duration. At some point, a symbol becomes mixed with echoes from other symbols and decoding becomes a mess. With OFDMA, become each channel is low bandwitdh (15 kHz, compared to 5 MHz for 3G for example) the symbol duration is very long. There's no problem handling with echoes, become the time delay is very small compared to the OFDM symbol duration. The price to pay for this is doing a FFT over the bandwidth to recover all the basic carriers. That's up to 2k FFT. It's doable and practical now thanks to Moore law.
That should give you a quick overview. And to the experts: please forgive the necessary simplifications to fit in a few paragraphs.
Technical superiority is not all there is to things, and sometimes a bad standard that enables interoperability is much better than a good standard that does not. USB is a classic example of that.
ATSC also uses 8-VSB modulation instead of COFDM. 8-VSB has serious problems with multipath, and is damn near impossible to receive in a moving vehicle.
I believe DVB also supports h.264 as a codec, in addition to ATSC'S MPEG-2
The biggest shortcoming of ATSC was its lack of support for 1080p60 with long GOPs. It's not viable for live broadcast, but with offline non-realtime compression, you CAN do 1080p60 in 19.2mbit/sec. Just ask anybody who used to rip DVDs & re-encode them with ridiculously long GOPs and variable bitrate encoding so you could fit half of a DVD on a CD-R with minimal quality loss.
Well it (probably) means that they will have to search elsewhere for the CDMA firmware through with apps like cyanogenmod, which I use, I imagine they have the current one in archive but any tweaks and future releases of such might be difficult to find. On the other hand, they may just be able to pull a live one from a working phone and use that. On yet another hand, they may run into some licensing issues themselves if they make it publicly available. I'm doing a lot of guessing on this comment so don't take it too literally but I imagine that worst case scenario, something will work out that everyone will be happy with. I mean people can still jailbreak their iPhone no matter how hard Apple tries to stop them and I imagine that Cyanogenmod will have a process much much simple and easier then any Apple fan boy trying to jailbreak their iPhone.
Correct - The only Verizon phones with SIM slots are:
1) "global" phones that were dual-mode GSM/CDMA2000 for global roaming
2) LTE devices, since LTE requires a SIM. The SIM is, to my knowledge, not used for the legacy CDMA interfaces.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yes, but be aware that mobile IPv6 is mostly only used in "proxy" mode (PMIPv6). This means that from the device point of view, it looks like a simple "fixed" IPv6 set-up. The device only see it's mobile IP address, and has no notion that MIPv6 is used. PMIPv6 only happens between the LTE packet gateway (P-GW, where the home agent is located) and serving gateway (S-GW), in the network between the core and radio parts of the network, unseen from the device.
Device terminated MIPv6 is specified, but is unlikely to be used in practice. It would allow using MIP over other technologies, but at the cost of adding the MIP tunneling overhead over the radio link as well as more complexity on the device. Even with other radio access technologies, the preferred way is to use PMIP if possible, or then just change the IP on a switch.
So route optimization would only be a gain for the operator in a PMIPv6 set-up. In any case, due to security reasons the traffic will be forced through each mobile device assigned P-GW. Meaning: no route optimization. The P-GW is the box doing policy enforcement, and that's the natural place to support the lawful interception function (required by law in many countries, US among them) as it's a fixed point for a given user (it doesn't change with mobility, that's where the home agent is anchored).