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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."
Stingrays can be designed to work on any protocol. They first worked against GSM, which is what everyone in Canada is moving to vice CDMA.
I mean, that might be part of the reason... but I believe GSM is the global standard, faster, and more reliable. It sucks that it's been poisoned - what we need are apps for phones that can detect if it's connecting to a stingray, and overload the thing.
Most everyone is moving to LTE, not GSM. In any case, you don't hear much about GSM Stingrays because the entire GSM security model was holed YEARS ago so there was far less need to go to extremes to do GSM intercepts. They cheesey GSM encryption method has a variety of weaknesses and anyone inclined to do GSM intercepts can do so quite easily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The gear needed is basically a laptop and some innocent-looking antennas. It fits in a briefcase.
Since the iPhone was GSM-only for a long time, I would be shocked if Apple's competitors had not setup GSM intercept stations around the Apple campus and done wholesale capture for perhaps years at a time. Hell it can be done from three blocks away and nobody would even suspect a thing.
Sig for hire.
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.
Awful technology, CDMA.
CDMA technology is a fundamental method of communication used in a huge range of different platforms, from GPS, HDTV to broadband internet to various wireless formats. A lot of the gadgets and things we use every day rely upon CDMA to work.
You can bash the cellular product marketed as CDMA all you want. It's a big fat target. Go for it.
But the technology that name is more than just a cellular platform. CDMA is more useful than you imagine.
Sig for hire.
Stop spending on legacy infrastructure, generate more revenue from clients moving to more expensive plans.
Rename your wifi to "BEWARE OF STINGRAY" haha