> Excell was OK, but the data format, like all M$ junk, > kept changing and it's very dificult to get your work back out.
Excel (on the PC) has been backward (and forward) compatible with older versions from Excel 97 on. Older versions are readable by newer versions, i.e., backward compatibility is maintained. IIRC Excel uses the same data format on the Mac and the PC, so why exactly would you have a problem with "the data format... kept changing"?
As a lot of other posters in this thread have noted, Mozilla in the hand of lusers is no more invulnerable than IE is. And as for Opera -- well, at least IE *asks* (non-optional dialog) before re-setting my home page. Opera (6 *and* 7) doesn't.
I totally agree with you when you say, History proves over and over that single individuals can make a world-changing difference. But --
> And hell, what if Lincoln had not been elected President?.. > What if Ghandi hadn't been born?
The truth is, no one knows. Just as psychohistory was largely statistical, human societies are non-linear. Individual humans ("heroes") do come in, do act as inflection points -- but it is not as if other inflection points could not have existed.
Lincoln's opponent could have risen to the occasion as well. Many historians argue that India would have become free, Gandhi or not, because Britain was much too weak after WWII to deal with the "restive natives" (not all Indians were non-violent, a good many that were sentenced were called "seditionists" then, and almost certainly would be called freedom-fighters^W terrorists today).
Social behavior in the 1900s middle-east was pretty predictable: who in the middle of it would have predicted Kemal Atatürk? Yet, the really interesting thing is, given the almost-repeating patterns common to non-linear systems, how what will Turkey evolve into a hundred years from now? (e.g. Now a pro-Islamic party has been voted in there. Is this a major inflection or something that'll be damped out in no time? again, no one knows...)
> With all due respect to Asimov (who I don't think believed it himself
You are right, Asimov used it simply as one of the building blocks of a good yarn. Like the 3 laws of robotics. (In fact, in Forward the Foundation, written in the late 80s (or early 90s?), contains references to 'achaotic equations' he had to dream up because he could bear not acknowledging the growing body of evidence that the future is essentially non-linear).
Note how well Cringely has set him up: from the article:
And if it ever happens (the ring-kissing, I mean), don't forget Mike Class in Milwaukee, who came up with the idea in the first place. I don't know if Jesuit friars are allowed to accept big checks from corporations, but I'm sure Marquette University could always use the money.
I think Cringely was molested by Jesuit Priests or something when he was a kid, he's getting his jollies by seeing this poor man being turned into a laughing stock. Or maybe he hates Marquette U., where this poor sap teaches.
> I have relatives who use "free" services. They're pissed off by spam.
They get pissed off because they get spam on a free account? If they had to actually had to pay for the account, they'd probably be writing to their congresscritters to outlaw spam:-)
> My e-mail address tends to change every 2-3 years.
Actually, in the Good Old(tm) Days, most folk with email addresses used to have *one* email address, and stick to it for ages. Then came Hotmail, Yahoo and the like, and suddenly email addresses became free and disposable. I think this is a *big* reason why spam doesn't bother the average Joe and Jane -- too much spam? sign up for a new Yahoo account, and mail entire circle of friends about the change.
Spam only bothers folks who like having a well-known email address: and this is mostly geeks and sundry folk in the IT biz.
As another poster mentioned, ATMs are still a killer app for OS/2, e.g. HSBC uses NCR machines in India that run OS/2. More disconcertingly, these NCR machines use very *old* versions of OS/2, in fact, they are (c) Microsoft, and have a boot screen like this. Wonder why they haven't upgraded yet...
how are emacs, vim, the Linux kernel, openssl, openssh, and glibc "usability" successes.
Usability != usability among the mom n pop crowd. Is emacs usable by folk who want a powerful, uber-programmable editor? OTOH if you have ever tried a large OpenLDAP deployment, you'll realize it has quite a few limitations vis-a-vis its commercial cousins (that is not to say OpenLDAP is undeployable, just that it needs a bit too much TLC compared to comparable commercial offerings).
Calling any open-source package a failure is always a risk on a site like/. because both of package foo's users may gang up on you...:-)
Seriously, about MySQL: yes, that's why I said heavy duty databases. Regarding Latex and groff : a history professor can use Mozilla. Can he use Latex? (high probability: no, although I'm sure someone'll come along to prove me wrong:-))
Office software: should've said, Office Suite. I wasn't talking about market share (by that metric, Mozilla would flunk) but whether the product is any good for a wide audience. Again, the same about sendmail et al: sendmail et al are successful while groupware isn't, because sendmail isn't half-baked, it's good at what it does. Similarly, Mozilla hasn't been half-baked since pre-M16 days. On the other hand, most office suites and groupware products do not have a credible feature-set against the market leaders (in the groupware market, this is actually Notes+Domino, not an MS app).
OpenOffice is actually very interesting; there are parts (like Calc) that're quite good. But Writer is an embarrassment for my occasional burrow out of vim; therefore the half-baked tag.
... but not necessarily in areas suits would like. It is worth it to remember that Clay Shirky (who submitted this article) is a well-known VC, so from his viewpoint it is understandable that Python would not seem very innovative.
Open source uber-successes (innovation + usability): Apache, Sendmail, Perl, Python, PHP, emacs, vim (vim adds sufficiently to vi to justify it being innovative imho)
Open source successes (usability): Nautilus, Gnome, KDE, Evolution, the Linux kernel, GPG, glibc, Mozilla, OpenSSL, OpenSSH
Open source failures*: Directory Servers, Calendaring/Groupware servers, Office software, desktop publishing tools, graphics/prepress tools (the Gimp isn't a prepress tool), message queueing systems, heavy duty databases (despite SAP/DB).
I see a pattern here: Open source does pretty well at stock protocols that fulfil community/individual needs, it has even done reasonably well at end-user desktops (Nautilus being the crowing example -- if only the rest of the Linux desktop was that good!:-))
Where we have not done well is about stuff that solves suits' needs: directory servers and groupware being a classic example.
I think we'll need some initiative from the industry now to fill these gaps, because it is not obvious that the community is going to scratch those itches anytime soon. Sun's open-sourcing StarOffice was great, OpenOffice has a chance of catching up with MSOffice in ~2 years. I sometimes wonder what would happen if IBM were to walk the talk and open up *any* of the following: DB/2, Domino+Notes, SmartSuite.
* yes, I am aware of OpenLDAP and OpenOffice, thank you.
Why not? roaming with CDMA just as possible as with GSM -- as long as you are in an area where CDMA is supported, which for in India is nationwide, with more than one vendor: Reliance, Tata Indicom and BSNL.
> CDMA is already present in the US, some of Latin America and some of the Far East. Yet handsets are routinely more expensive
Acknowledged, but let us see. anyway, handsets in the CDMA world (also in the European GSM world, afaik) are routinely subsidized by the vendor, so I'm really not too sure this is a big deal.
>> The key word here is 'if' -- if they introduce 3G in the first place > Yes, but again this is just a dumb regulatory issue that should go away?
*No*. That's the whole point. Because introducing 2.5G requires dedicated spectrum, and rolling 3G requires new spectrum (that they can't use for vanilla GSM -- effectively 3G GSM == WCDMA == CDMA, and W-CDMA has royalties on it just as CDMA 2000 has).
As i said at the beginning of the thread, *this* is the big hit against existing GSM vendors who are saddled with equipment they cannot use to offer next-generation services. Existing equipment must be replaced. They need money to buy new equipment (AND maybe spectrum -- but if they don't buy new spectrum, then vanilla GSM users are left out in the cold) to offer 3G.
On the other hand, a player who enters from scratch NOW with CDMA 2000 has a clear path to "3G"-compatible services: he can offer voice with 1X, and on the same spectrum then add a PDSN and modify/upgrade rather than replace other equipment to offer 1XEV-DO, and then add some more to offer 1XEV-DV with little incremental trouble.
Like so many other things in engineering, decisions in favor of W-CDMA or CDMA 2000 will be taken on the basis of technical excellence + economic realities, and this is how it should be.
> this reminds me of another question: is there, or will there be, any market for GSM at all?
Oh yes, for cheap voice telephony + reliable roaming, GSM's great (barring stupid Indian vendors:-)). the problem is -- if all GSM vendors move onto 3G (W-CDMA)or GPRS, and abandon vanilla GSM service then your vanilla GSM phones won't work. No backward compatibility sucks.:-( (To be fair, this is unlikely to happen anytime soon)
> we would need at least better and cheaper Palm OS, GNU/Linux and Java phones, and even then I do not see it as a given.
I think Linux has a very bright future inside cellphones, but I don't think the air interface really matters to the OS powering the phone's apps. Conversely, the OS doesn't really matter to the telco.
The "feat" IMHO is more that they got through India's bureaucratic maze and got regulatory approval for this, rather than any technical new-ness.
> Users are blocked from roaming
This could change soon. Reliance is trying to get full-fledged roaming licenses as well. If it succeeds, users *will* get roaming.
> [users] have to pay more for handsets
I don't agree with this. In a large, price-sensitive market like India, prices do crash. GSM phones started in India at Rs12,000+, they can now be had at sub-3,000 levels. No reason to believe the same won't happen to the CDMA market. Plus it'll be very interesting to watch MS' reaction as cheap J2ME phones (instead of their beloved Stingers) flood the market:-)
Also, the customer does benefit in a very direct way -- lower call charges. Indian call charges (especially Long Distance) was unaffordable for many Indians -- the cost of the handset pales in comparison.
> Investors could see their assets devaluated if GSM 3G succeeds
The key word here is 'if' -- if they introduce 3G in the first place (remember, it'll cost 'em big money!). The Indian GSM operators have been a bunch of lazy bums 'til now, not introducing any new services (barring, as another poster mentioned, BPL in Bombay with GPRS) with the excuse that "we're hardly making any money".
Well, someone has just lit a fire under their collective arses. Let's see if they run or burn.
> what about the price & availability of [CDMA] handsets as compared to GSM, GPRS and UMTS ones?
Negligible difference, for the same reason that a P-III that cost $$$ when newly-introduced is throwaway-priced today: handsets are only as costly as the demand. In fact, a W-CDMA (UMTS) handset that also supports vanilla GSM would be costlier, because effectively you have to put two phones into one. CDMA handsets remain compatible with older CDMA networks, including CDMA95.
> And what about Qualcom royalties, do they exist also in GSM 3G?
This was probably the single biggest grouse about CDMA - Qualcomm's money gouging. El Reg, never one of Qualcomm's biggest fans, reports though that for CDMA2000 they have reasonable royalties - 5-6% of equipment cost.
Incidentally, Qualcomm also markets W-CDMA which is used in GSM based 3G networks/UMTS, because it owns the patents. So I guess it wins either way!:-|
Yes and no. Yes, TDMA and GSM use time division multiplexing. But when people write TDMA, they mean the US proprietary version, not the European GSM open standard.
Oh, you meant AT&T's IS-136 TDMA-based system, not TDMA-the-encoding-standard. Oh yes, that sucks big time.
Also remember that business tend to see short-term only, and has made the US stuck to CDMA & TDMA. Europe saw further down the road, and thus gave us GSM.
Actually the US decided on no technology, it just let the market decide. Europe's trouble seems to be that it saw only a bit further down the road, and then settled for GSM. From what I hear, a lot of European telcos are whining about not being allowed to offer CDMA 2000 now.
But is W-CDMA a marketing or a technological problem?
I'd say it's an engineering problem: in theory, W-CDMA should work, it's the fault of the implementors (DoCoMo et al). On the other hand, W-CDMA is new, and is (much more importantly) incompatible with the standard it is replacing, i.e., vanilla GSM. So when folk rolling out the new service get technical glitches (like DoCoMo did in Japan ) handsets had to be recalled twice. In Europe, they are facing handset/network incompatibilities, because of which Finnish operators like Sonera (among others) deferred 3G plans.
Considering that CDMA 2000 gives you a phased series of technologies to roll out (1X: 144k/s, 1XEV-DO: 2M/s, 1XEV-DV: 4M+/s + simultaneous voice+data) with one investment (instead of three as in GSM's case: one for GSM, one for 2.5G, one for 3G), it becomes economically judicious to use CDMA 2000. So, I wouldn't exactly say it is a marketing decision by any means.
Actually Europe mandating an open standard made phones better, cheaper, more useful in Europe and all the rest of the GSM world
True. India too has been using GSM -- for 7 years now. And yes, GSM as a ubiquitous standard made roaming possible and very easy. But now that we want to take cellular telephony to the next level (in terms of data rates), GSM is proving to be not-quite-upto the task, at least, not without spending lots more money in new GPRS networks. So do we stick to the old-familiar standard, or use a new one?
You have to remember that interconnect agreements are mostly a commercial matter. The only reason the US cell scene is so balkanized is that companies like Nextel and AT&T have not allowed it, not because it isn't technically possible. (think AOL and instant messaging). In India, telecom regulations say that telcos MUST allow interconnects or face lawsuits.
> For a guy on india-gii, how come you didn't know about BPL Mobile's GPRS service? > BPL Mobile in Mumbai has had GPRS live for a year (December 2001 - so your references may need to be updated), with over 5000 customers.
How about the bad excuse that I joined India-GII only about four days back:-) ? Should've read the archives, I guess! As for BPL's GPRS service, mea culpa! Bad research on my part.
But 5000 GPRS customers in one whole year -- if true, that sounds bad. What kind of rates are they charging?
> And BPL Mobile's rolling out GPRS in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Maharastra by Feb 2003.
Great! more power to them! Won't help me, though -- I don't think BPL services Madras city:-(. This is where, I'm sure you'll agree, a pan-India service helps.
> Airtel is rumoured to have it ready for rollout next month all India.
Please. I've heard that story from them for quite some time now. As a current Air("Busy Signals are our Middle Name")Tel customer, any promise they make has zero cred with me. OTOH, if they do launch, good for them. I'll believe it when I see it:-).
> However, your point about incremental costs is valid, as far as 2.5G and 3G go.
The cost is my biggest concern. I fear that for a lot of in-the-red operators, GPRS will be a low priority. And this means we'll be stuck in 9.6kbps-land for ages.
> However, I was referring to voice penetration, which I think is more critical for India, rather than high-speed data.
Well, the thing is -- voice is nice, but if the same network gives high-speed data, so much the better (especially since CDMA 2000 1X EV-DO is a pretty smooth upgrade path, unlike W-CDMA). The efficiencies possible in SCM alone justify this.
Small disclaimer: I don't get paid by Reliance, I'm not even remotely associated to them. I'm just a software nerd who's excited about a new high-speed *nationwide* network available to develop apps for. The air interface (or telco) really doesn't matter to me. Yeah, that and the low STD rates;-) (which I know BSNL will match as well, real soon now).
> Both CDMA and GSM/GPRS cost about the same to roll out.
Yes, right. But, it will cost *existing* GSM operators a lot to roll out GPRS on their existing networks. And when they go to 3G, it'll cost a lot again. CDMA is a bit more reasonable: you can roll out higher-speed services incrementally.
Ask yourself this: if GPRS is so easy to roll out, why has not one GSM provider in India provided GPRS so far? They've been talkingabout it since August 2001, it is in danger of turning into vaporware!
So the only way to build a high-speed GSM network is to build a 3G network from scratch. See my other reply in this thread -- people have tried this (notably DoCoMo in Japan) and have had egg on their faces.
How the open standard, high-volume GSM is more expensive than the proprietary, royalty-ridden, lower-volume CDMA?
For GPRS to work, spectrum has to be dedicated to data and voice separately. Existing GSM providers need to license more spectrum (this costs big money), have to upgrade their equipment and convince users to change handsets to support 2.5G ("GPRS"). Considering that they are all in the red, it ain't going to be easy. CDMA providers can provide voice+data over the same spectrum.
Because 3G deployments in Europe and Japan so far have been less than successful.
Because CDMA 2000 1X is coming with a massive second mover advantage, at a time when people need higher data rates from their mobile, and the GSM folk can't given them that quickly, the operative word being 'quickly'.
I agree a GSM-based high-speed standard would have been better. But the only way high-speed GSM would have taken off in India was if someone built a W-CDMA (which is the air interface for high speed GSM) network from scratch, and given European and Japanese experience with W-CDMA 'til now, I'd excuse any business for being slightly scared about this:).
In Brasil people are complaining every day that government has chosen TDMA and CDMA over the cheaper, standard GSM.
Huh? TDMA is the air interface for vanilla GSM. High speed GSM uses W-CDMA as the air interface because TDMA is so damn inefficient. Anyway, what business does the government have mandating technology? (Europe did this, mind you:-p) All they should sell is spectrum!
We know that Ku band satellites suffer from 'rain fade' during heavy downpours, making them unsuitable for many tropical areas (i.e. anywhere with monsoon-like rains). Any signals geeks willing to comment on how Ka-band does? Are these going to perform worse than Ku-band in bad weather?
...do we need all this flash & bell things in Explorer / whatever in the first place ? Sure it's nice to see tags of a file without opening, but is it really necessary ? Couldn't people live without it ?
Well, a lot of people use Windows, many of them novices, and many of them like tooltips. However, the windows shell is also fairly customizable (though its no Enlightenment) and if you don't like tooltips, all you have to do is (works with Win2k):
Open "My Computer". Tools | Folder options... | View tab. Uncheck "Show popup descriptions for folder and desktop items."
A similar option should exist for XP.
Yes, those two are probably some of his best novels (He won a Hugo for 'The Gods Themselves' IIRC).
And folk who like Arthur C Clarke could check out "Childhood's End" (magnificent!) and "Imperial Earth" (there's hardly any plot, but the world it depicts is amazing).
I always thought it was <a href="http://www.cyberhaven.com/books/sciencefict<nobr>i<wbr></wbr></nobr> on/robotdreams.html">inspired</a> by Gibbon's <em>Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</em> (in fact, this is mentioned in several of Asimov's own prefaces), which isn't quite `middle ages'.
How come you don't consider Joe User's freedom to enjoy his spare time, to be free from crappy software that does what he needs?
Sorry, typo. Should've read: How come you don't consider Joe User's freedom to enjoy his spare time, to be free from crappy software that does not do what he needs? Is my time best served by checking out stuff from the Dia's CVS repos to see where they got this week or by using Visio? For me, it's a no-brainer -- Visio.
(Of course, w.r.t. Dia I'm a *user*. I can't contribute. Doesn't mean I can't contribute elsewhere -- in fact, I try to contribute to a few GnuPG-related projects. But my point is, no matter how proficient I am, for some things I'll always be a user, and unlike RMS I cannot say "Free Software or Bust" -- sorry.)
> I'm sorry, are you arguing for MS, or against them?
And all I'm arguing for is ``the best tool for the job''. I'm the type who switched once from Netscape 3 to IE 4 because it was better (used NT at the time, IE wasn't bundled then) and would switch again in a heartbeat if something better showed up. (Mozilla comes pretty close, and in fact Mozilla Mail with stuff like Bayesian spam filtering may be attractive enough to displace Outlook Express.)
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> Excell was OK, but the data format, like all M$ junk,
> kept changing and it's very dificult to get your work back out.
Excel (on the PC) has been backward (and forward) compatible with older versions from Excel 97 on. Older versions are readable by newer versions, i.e., backward compatibility is maintained. IIRC Excel uses the same data format on the Mac and the PC, so why exactly would you have a problem with "the data format... kept changing"?
As a lot of other posters in this thread have noted, Mozilla in the hand of lusers is no more invulnerable than IE is. And as for Opera -- well, at least IE *asks* (non-optional dialog) before re-setting my home page. Opera (6 *and* 7) doesn't.
So much for the IE suXors argument.
I totally agree with you when you say, History proves over and over that single individuals can make a world-changing difference. But --
..
> And hell, what if Lincoln had not been elected President?
> What if Ghandi hadn't been born?
The truth is, no one knows. Just as psychohistory was largely statistical, human societies are non-linear. Individual humans ("heroes") do come in, do act as inflection points -- but it is not as if other inflection points could not have existed.
Lincoln's opponent could have risen to the occasion as well. Many historians argue that India would have become free, Gandhi or not, because Britain was much too weak after WWII to deal with the "restive natives" (not all Indians were non-violent, a good many that were sentenced were called "seditionists" then, and almost certainly would be called freedom-fighters^W terrorists today).
Social behavior in the 1900s middle-east was pretty predictable: who in the middle of it would have predicted Kemal Atatürk? Yet, the really interesting thing is, given the almost-repeating patterns common to non-linear systems, how what will Turkey evolve into a hundred years from now? (e.g. Now a pro-Islamic party has been voted in there. Is this a major inflection or something that'll be damped out in no time? again, no one knows...)
> With all due respect to Asimov (who I don't think believed it himself
You are right, Asimov used it simply as one of the building blocks of a good yarn. Like the 3 laws of robotics. (In fact, in Forward the Foundation, written in the late 80s (or early 90s?), contains references to 'achaotic equations' he had to dream up because he could bear not acknowledging the growing body of evidence that the future is essentially non-linear).
> I have relatives who use "free" services. They're pissed off by spam.
:-)
They get pissed off because they get spam on a free account? If they had to actually had to pay for the account, they'd probably be writing to their congresscritters to outlaw spam
> My e-mail address tends to change every 2-3 years.
Actually, in the Good Old(tm) Days, most folk with email addresses used to have *one* email address, and stick to it for ages. Then came Hotmail, Yahoo and the like, and suddenly email addresses became free and disposable. I think this is a *big* reason why spam doesn't bother the average Joe and Jane -- too much spam? sign up for a new Yahoo account, and mail entire circle of friends about the change.
Spam only bothers folks who like having a well-known email address: and this is mostly geeks and sundry folk in the IT biz.
As another poster mentioned, ATMs are still a killer app for OS/2, e.g. HSBC uses NCR machines in India that run OS/2. More disconcertingly, these NCR machines use very *old* versions of OS/2, in fact, they are (c) Microsoft, and have a boot screen like this. Wonder why they haven't upgraded yet...
how are emacs, vim, the Linux kernel, openssl, openssh, and glibc "usability" successes.
Usability != usability among the mom n pop crowd. Is emacs usable by folk who want a powerful, uber-programmable editor? OTOH if you have ever tried a large OpenLDAP deployment, you'll realize it has quite a few limitations vis-a-vis its commercial cousins (that is not to say OpenLDAP is undeployable, just that it needs a bit too much TLC compared to comparable commercial offerings).
Calling any open-source package a failure is always a risk on a site like /. because both of package foo's users may gang up on you... :-)
:-))
Seriously, about MySQL: yes, that's why I said heavy duty databases. Regarding Latex and groff : a history professor can use Mozilla. Can he use Latex? (high probability: no, although I'm sure someone'll come along to prove me wrong
Office software: should've said, Office Suite. I wasn't talking about market share (by that metric, Mozilla would flunk) but whether the product is any good for a wide audience. Again, the same about sendmail et al: sendmail et al are successful while groupware isn't, because sendmail isn't half-baked, it's good at what it does. Similarly, Mozilla hasn't been half-baked since pre-M16 days. On the other hand, most office suites and groupware products do not have a credible feature-set against the market leaders (in the groupware market, this is actually Notes+Domino, not an MS app).
OpenOffice is actually very interesting; there are parts (like Calc) that're quite good. But Writer is an embarrassment for my occasional burrow out of vim; therefore the half-baked tag.
my job was to assess new businesses' technologies. I certainly wan't the one writing the checks
:-)
Sheesh. I stand corrected. Anyway, I guess in hindsight it's obvious, from your past writings you seemed a bit too clueful to just write cheques
... but not necessarily in areas suits would like. It is worth it to remember that Clay Shirky (who submitted this article) is a well-known VC, so from his viewpoint it is understandable that Python would not seem very innovative.
:-))
Open source uber-successes (innovation + usability): Apache, Sendmail, Perl, Python, PHP, emacs, vim (vim adds sufficiently to vi to justify it being innovative imho)
Open source successes (usability): Nautilus, Gnome, KDE, Evolution, the Linux kernel, GPG, glibc, Mozilla, OpenSSL, OpenSSH
Open source failures*: Directory Servers, Calendaring/Groupware servers, Office software, desktop publishing tools, graphics/prepress tools (the Gimp isn't a prepress tool), message queueing systems, heavy duty databases (despite SAP/DB).
I see a pattern here: Open source does pretty well at stock protocols that fulfil community/individual needs, it has even done reasonably well at end-user desktops (Nautilus being the crowing example -- if only the rest of the Linux desktop was that good!
Where we have not done well is about stuff that solves suits' needs: directory servers and groupware being a classic example.
I think we'll need some initiative from the industry now to fill these gaps, because it is not obvious that the community is going to scratch those itches anytime soon. Sun's open-sourcing StarOffice was great, OpenOffice has a chance of catching up with MSOffice in ~2 years. I sometimes wonder what would happen if IBM were to walk the talk and open up *any* of the following: DB/2, Domino+Notes, SmartSuite.
* yes, I am aware of OpenLDAP and OpenOffice, thank you.
> Not without GSM, AFAIU.
:-)). the problem is -- if all GSM vendors move onto 3G (W-CDMA)or GPRS, and abandon vanilla GSM service then your vanilla GSM phones won't work. No backward compatibility sucks. :-( (To be fair, this is unlikely to happen anytime soon)
Why not? roaming with CDMA just as possible as with GSM -- as long as you are in an area where CDMA is supported, which for in India is nationwide, with more than one vendor: Reliance, Tata Indicom and BSNL.
> CDMA is already present in the US, some of Latin America and some of the Far East. Yet handsets are routinely more expensive
Acknowledged, but let us see. anyway, handsets in the CDMA world (also in the European GSM world, afaik) are routinely subsidized by the vendor, so I'm really not too sure this is a big deal.
>> The key word here is 'if' -- if they introduce 3G in the first place
> Yes, but again this is just a dumb regulatory issue that should go away?
*No*. That's the whole point. Because introducing 2.5G requires dedicated spectrum, and rolling 3G requires new spectrum (that they can't use for vanilla GSM -- effectively 3G GSM == WCDMA == CDMA, and W-CDMA has royalties on it just as CDMA 2000 has).
As i said at the beginning of the thread, *this* is the big hit against existing GSM vendors who are saddled with equipment they cannot use to offer next-generation services. Existing equipment must be replaced. They need money to buy new equipment (AND maybe spectrum -- but if they don't buy new spectrum, then vanilla GSM users are left out in the cold) to offer 3G.
On the other hand, a player who enters from scratch NOW with CDMA 2000 has a clear path to "3G"-compatible services: he can offer voice with 1X, and on the same spectrum then add a PDSN and modify/upgrade rather than replace other equipment to offer 1XEV-DO, and then add some more to offer 1XEV-DV with little incremental trouble.
Like so many other things in engineering, decisions in favor of W-CDMA or CDMA 2000 will be taken on the basis of technical excellence + economic realities, and this is how it should be.
> this reminds me of another question: is there, or will there be, any market for GSM at all?
Oh yes, for cheap voice telephony + reliable roaming, GSM's great (barring stupid Indian vendors
> we would need at least better and cheaper Palm OS, GNU/Linux and Java phones, and even then I do not see it as a given.
I think Linux has a very bright future inside cellphones, but I don't think the air interface really matters to the OS powering the phone's apps. Conversely, the OS doesn't really matter to the telco.
> OK, but a feat?
:-)
The "feat" IMHO is more that they got through India's bureaucratic maze and got regulatory approval for this, rather than any technical new-ness.
> Users are blocked from roaming
This could change soon. Reliance is trying to get full-fledged roaming licenses as well. If it succeeds, users *will* get roaming.
> [users] have to pay more for handsets
I don't agree with this. In a large, price-sensitive market like India, prices do crash. GSM phones started in India at Rs12,000+, they can now be had at sub-3,000 levels. No reason to believe the same won't happen to the CDMA market. Plus it'll be very interesting to watch MS' reaction as cheap J2ME phones (instead of their beloved Stingers) flood the market
Also, the customer does benefit in a very direct way -- lower call charges. Indian call charges (especially Long Distance) was unaffordable for many Indians -- the cost of the handset pales in comparison.
> Investors could see their assets devaluated if GSM 3G succeeds
The key word here is 'if' -- if they introduce 3G in the first place (remember, it'll cost 'em big money!). The Indian GSM operators have been a bunch of lazy bums 'til now, not introducing any new services (barring, as another poster mentioned, BPL in Bombay with GPRS) with the excuse that "we're hardly making any money".
Well, someone has just lit a fire under their collective arses. Let's see if they run or burn.
> what about the price & availability of [CDMA] handsets as compared to GSM, GPRS and UMTS ones?
:-|
Negligible difference, for the same reason that a P-III that cost $$$ when newly-introduced is throwaway-priced today: handsets are only as costly as the demand. In fact, a W-CDMA (UMTS) handset that also supports vanilla GSM would be costlier, because effectively you have to put two phones into one. CDMA handsets remain compatible with older CDMA networks, including CDMA95.
> And what about Qualcom royalties, do they exist also in GSM 3G?
This was probably the single biggest grouse about CDMA - Qualcomm's money gouging. El Reg, never one of Qualcomm's biggest fans, reports though that for CDMA2000 they have reasonable royalties - 5-6% of equipment cost.
Incidentally, Qualcomm also markets W-CDMA which is used in GSM based 3G networks/UMTS, because it owns the patents. So I guess it wins either way!
Oh, you meant AT&T's IS-136 TDMA-based system, not TDMA-the-encoding-standard. Oh yes, that sucks big time.
Actually the US decided on no technology, it just let the market decide. Europe's trouble seems to be that it saw only a bit further down the road, and then settled for GSM. From what I hear, a lot of European telcos are whining about not being allowed to offer CDMA 2000 now.
I'd say it's an engineering problem: in theory, W-CDMA should work, it's the fault of the implementors (DoCoMo et al). On the other hand, W-CDMA is new, and is (much more importantly) incompatible with the standard it is replacing, i.e., vanilla GSM. So when folk rolling out the new service get technical glitches (like DoCoMo did in Japan ) handsets had to be recalled twice. In Europe, they are facing handset/network incompatibilities, because of which Finnish operators like Sonera (among others) deferred 3G plans.
Considering that CDMA 2000 gives you a phased series of technologies to roll out (1X: 144k/s, 1XEV-DO: 2M/s, 1XEV-DV: 4M+/s + simultaneous voice+data) with one investment (instead of three as in GSM's case: one for GSM, one for 2.5G, one for 3G), it becomes economically judicious to use CDMA 2000. So, I wouldn't exactly say it is a marketing decision by any means.
True. India too has been using GSM -- for 7 years now. And yes, GSM as a ubiquitous standard made roaming possible and very easy. But now that we want to take cellular telephony to the next level (in terms of data rates), GSM is proving to be not-quite-upto the task, at least, not without spending lots more money in new GPRS networks. So do we stick to the old-familiar standard, or use a new one?
You have to remember that interconnect agreements are mostly a commercial matter. The only reason the US cell scene is so balkanized is that companies like Nextel and AT&T have not allowed it, not because it isn't technically possible. (think AOL and instant messaging). In India, telecom regulations say that telcos MUST allow interconnects or face lawsuits.
> For a guy on india-gii, how come you didn't know about BPL Mobile's GPRS service?
:-) ? Should've read the archives, I guess! As for BPL's GPRS service, mea culpa! Bad research on my part.
:-(. This is where, I'm sure you'll agree, a pan-India service helps.
:-).
;-) (which I know BSNL will match as well, real soon now).
> BPL Mobile in Mumbai has had GPRS live for a year (December 2001 - so your references may need to be updated), with over 5000 customers.
How about the bad excuse that I joined India-GII only about four days back
But 5000 GPRS customers in one whole year -- if true, that sounds bad. What kind of rates are they charging?
> And BPL Mobile's rolling out GPRS in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Maharastra by Feb 2003.
Great! more power to them! Won't help me, though -- I don't think BPL services Madras city
> Airtel is rumoured to have it ready for rollout next month all India.
Please. I've heard that story from them for quite some time now. As a current Air("Busy Signals are our Middle Name")Tel customer, any promise they make has zero cred with me. OTOH, if they do launch, good for them. I'll believe it when I see it
> However, your point about incremental costs is valid, as far as 2.5G and 3G go.
The cost is my biggest concern. I fear that for a lot of in-the-red operators, GPRS will be a low priority. And this means we'll be stuck in 9.6kbps-land for ages.
> However, I was referring to voice penetration, which I think is more critical for India, rather than high-speed data.
Well, the thing is -- voice is nice, but if the same network gives high-speed data, so much the better (especially since CDMA 2000 1X EV-DO is a pretty smooth upgrade path, unlike W-CDMA). The efficiencies possible in SCM alone justify this.
Small disclaimer: I don't get paid by Reliance, I'm not even remotely associated to them. I'm just a software nerd who's excited about a new high-speed *nationwide* network available to develop apps for. The air interface (or telco) really doesn't matter to me. Yeah, that and the low STD rates
> Both CDMA and GSM/GPRS cost about the same to roll out.
Yes, right. But, it will cost *existing* GSM operators a lot to roll out GPRS on their existing networks. And when they go to 3G, it'll cost a lot again. CDMA is a bit more reasonable: you can roll out higher-speed services incrementally.
Ask yourself this: if GPRS is so easy to roll out, why has not one GSM provider in India provided GPRS so far? They've been talking about it since August 2001, it is in danger of turning into vaporware!
So the only way to build a high-speed GSM network is to build a 3G network from scratch. See my other reply in this thread -- people have tried this (notably DoCoMo in Japan) and have had egg on their faces.
For GPRS to work, spectrum has to be dedicated to data and voice separately. Existing GSM providers need to license more spectrum (this costs big money), have to upgrade their equipment and convince users to change handsets to support 2.5G ("GPRS"). Considering that they are all in the red, it ain't going to be easy. CDMA providers can provide voice+data over the same spectrum.
Because 3G deployments in Europe and Japan so far have been less than successful.
Because CDMA 2000 1X is coming with a massive second mover advantage, at a time when people need higher data rates from their mobile, and the GSM folk can't given them that quickly, the operative word being 'quickly'.
I agree a GSM-based high-speed standard would have been better. But the only way high-speed GSM would have taken off in India was if someone built a W-CDMA (which is the air interface for high speed GSM) network from scratch, and given European and Japanese experience with W-CDMA 'til now, I'd excuse any business for being slightly scared about this :).
In Brasil people are complaining every day that government has chosen TDMA and CDMA over the cheaper, standard GSM.
Huh? TDMA is the air interface for vanilla GSM. High speed GSM uses W-CDMA as the air interface because TDMA is so damn inefficient. Anyway, what business does the government have mandating technology? (Europe did this, mind you :-p) All they should sell is spectrum!
Doesn't "Google" use as a verb dilute its trademark value? (Something like that happened to Xerox).
Yes, those two are probably some of his best novels (He won a Hugo for 'The Gods Themselves' IIRC).
And folk who like Arthur C Clarke could check out "Childhood's End" (magnificent!) and "Imperial Earth" (there's hardly any plot, but the world it depicts is amazing).
I always thought it was <a href="http://www.cyberhaven.com/books/sciencefict<nobr>i<wbr></wbr></nobr> on/robotdreams.html">inspired</a> by Gibbon's <em>Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</em> (in fact, this is mentioned in several of Asimov's own prefaces), which isn't quite `middle ages'.
Did anyone else think the reporter's name was odd ("Jennifer 8.Lee")? Reminded me of 3Jane from Neuromancer. :)
How come you don't consider Joe User's freedom to enjoy his spare time, to be free from crappy software that does what he needs?
Sorry, typo. Should've read: How come you don't consider Joe User's freedom to enjoy his spare time, to be free from crappy software that does not do what he needs? Is my time best served by checking out stuff from the Dia's CVS repos to see where they got this week or by using Visio? For me, it's a no-brainer -- Visio.
(Of course, w.r.t. Dia I'm a *user*. I can't contribute. Doesn't mean I can't contribute elsewhere -- in fact, I try to contribute to a few GnuPG-related projects. But my point is, no matter how proficient I am, for some things I'll always be a user, and unlike RMS I cannot say "Free Software or Bust" -- sorry.)
> I'm sorry, are you arguing for MS, or against them?
And all I'm arguing for is ``the best tool for the job''. I'm the type who switched once from Netscape 3 to IE 4 because it was better (used NT at the time, IE wasn't bundled then) and would switch again in a heartbeat if something better showed up. (Mozilla comes pretty close, and in fact Mozilla Mail with stuff like Bayesian spam filtering may be attractive enough to displace Outlook Express.)
If that's trolling, then so be it.