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Telus To Shutter CDMA Service On January 31, 2017 (mobilesyrup.com)
An anonymous reader writes: With most Canadian mobile devices on some form of HSPA+ or LTE network, you don't hear mention of CDMA that often anymore. And for good reason; carriers like Telus, which still maintain their CDMA network for legacy customers, plan to mothball the tech over the next few years. We now have a definitive date when Telus customers will no longer be able to use their old CDMA device. Over the weekend, the company sent text messages stating, "CDMA service ends January 31, 2017. Move to our 4G network with great offers."
Seriously, get rid of 2G and improve privacy. Without 2G, privacy-invading devices like stingrays won't work any longer. Plus it will free up the bandwidth for more efficient uses.
Awful technology, CDMA.
Shame on whoever modded the OP to -1. The present generation of stingrays jams 4g and 3g signals, then presents a fake 2g tower. The lack of security in 2g means that phones will connect to the fake tower. Their position can then be triangulated. Furthermore, the lack of security in 2g makes it particularly easy to intercept any communications. While the Hailstorm upgrades may enable location tracking once 2g is gone, it's expensive to upgrade and hopefully will be prohibitive at least in some places. Anything that makes the use of stingrays more difficult and breaks some of their features is a good thing. No, shutting down 2g won't completely stop the use if stingrays, but it's definitely an impediment. There was also no good reason to downmod the OP. Honestly, that's what drives me to troll at times, because posts made in good faith get modded down anyway.
Dude... That's not even trolling. Find a hobby you're actually good at, will you?
CDMA won the GSM vs. CDMA war. The HSPA/HSDPA 3G service in most GSM phones uses CDMA or wideband CDMA.
See, the original GSM spec used TDMA - basically each phone is assigned a timeslice and all phones take turns talking with the tower. This meant that even if the phone didn't have much data to transmit or didn't need to send any data at all, it still used a full timeslice. Couple that with time buffers to account for phones being different distances from the tower, and GSM ends up wasting a lot of bandwidth. CDMA allows all phones to transmit at the same time. The tower tells them apart by assigning an orthogonal code to each phone. Bandwidth scales automatically between phones because each phone sees the other phones' transmissions as noise, thus reducing the signal to noise ratio and reducing bandwidth. If a phone doesn't need data for a few seconds, the noise decreases, the SNR for the other phones increases, and that extra bandwidth is immediately available for all the other phones to use.
This is why CDMA carriers got 3G about a year before GSM carriers. Their towers could already provide 3G data speeds. GSM had to amend the GSM spec to specify CDMA and wideband CDMA data services, then wait for handset manufacturers and carriers to implement it. This is also why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time. They had two separate radios - a TDMA radio for voice, a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single radio which could be used for voice or data, but not both at the same time.
Most implementations of LTE use OFDMA. It does the same thing as CDMA, except using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA served as the proof of concept for widescale simultaneous orthogonal transmissions, so without it LTE probably would not exist or would not be as mature ias it is today. (OFDMA requires more processing power than CDMA, which is why it came later. WiMax used OFDMA, and my Galaxy S phone which used it would die after 3-4 hours on WiMax vs 8-12 hours on 3G CDMA.)
If the U.S. had followed the rest of the world in adopting GSM and had prohibited CDMA, our mobile data speeds today would probably be around 100-500 kbps. So be glad CDMA won, even if Qualcomm is evil.
So help me out here - what does this mean in comparison to all the times I have poor signal and my phone falls back to a 3G connection? If I was a customer in their service area, is there simply LTE everywhere such that a fallback isn't needed, desirable, or possible? This also will disconnect older-but-still-fully-functional 3G iPads, and cars with mobile connections that are not LTE-capable.
Stop spending on legacy infrastructure, generate more revenue from clients moving to more expensive plans.
I just can't understand any of it ever since Telus outsourced their customer support. Try discussing technical issues when you can't understand the CSR and they can't understand you. Telus is one of the worst of the worst companies to deal with. Seriously, poking red hot needles in your own eyes is more a treat than dealing with Telus.
Great offers, my arse.
Under low usage, CDMA could cover more area than TDMA/GSM. If the usage went to high, the coverage area would automatically shrink. Carriers trying to cover vast areas like Canada and the US choose it so it cut down the number of towers needed to cover an area. The reason Verizon still has the largest coverage in the US. But, it never became a global standard and it is now cheaper to field GSM based systems since the parts are cheaper due to a larger user base. Remember, these are voice standards, not data standards. In the US, Verizon is CDMA and LTE, AT&T is GSM and LTE. They are slowly converting to voice over data, so they will eventually get rid of the voice only channels.
What are the chances that someone who is using legacy technology is also in the group that doesn't/doesn't know how to read texts?
TDMA was indeed part of the original GSM design, and CDMA was far more efficient - better coverage with fewer towers. Later revisions added CDMA and later technologies to GSM.
Which comes at the end of this year. https://www.business.att.com/enterprise/Portfolio/internet-of-things/cd2migration/page=addl-info/