More specifically, regular analog, wired, phone service. ISDN isn't POTS, for example, but is delivered by landlines. (I guess VoIP is delivered by landlines too.)
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo
on
Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 4, Informative
A similar "friendly nickname" is given to the BBC which is frequently refered to (unfortunately, probably more often by itself) as "Auntie Beeb", for much the same reason.
FWIW, 3G is NOT a standard. 3G is a marketing and political term. It essentially boils down to "These standards support data rates approximately better than the worst DSL available."
The following, totally incompatable, systems are considered "3G". UMTS. CDMA2000. FOMA. GSM with EDGE is also considered 3G by some groups, though it's borderline in practical terms.
There are others, but these are the most popular.
"3G" is little more than an attempt to extract more frequencies from governments by proposing they'll be necessary for a hypothetical future generation of mobile phones, which are assumed to provide video and high-speed Internet access. To call the entire concept fraud isn't far from the truth, but that said, governments have needed prodding as far as releasing their stranglehold on radio goes. Outside of government lobbying, it's a marketing term, with companies keen to portray their latest offering as 3G, usually redefining the term very few months so they can announce a minor upgrade as "3G" each time they do one.
So, no, 3G is not a standard. Looking at one of the links an earlier poster mentioned, it looks like Japan is getting UMTS via Vodafone (UMTS is essentially 3G GSM), FOMA, and CDMA2000, to add to 2G PDC and PHS. Can't comment on FOMA. CDMA2000 is an incremental enhancement to the US IS-95 standard, which in practical terms is barely a second generation standard (IS-95's essentially a digital version of AMPS, the old analog standard in the US, and is deployed largely because it's cheap - and I mean that in every sense of the word) the only "nice" part is the air interface technology, and seems - for the most part - to be incompatable with the rest of the world for the sake of doing so.) UMTS is, by all accounts, pretty good - all the benefits of GSM with improved data rates and capacity - as long as Vodafone over there do not screw up, you're not "far behind" with phones. You'll at least have UMTS, and have the CDMA2000 people pushing the UMTS people in terms of prices.
It's obvious in context - but single articles from the Onion regularly get picked up and passed along as "real" news stories. It gets harder to tell when context is removed.
If something ceases to be satire the moment one person takes it seriously, then there's no such thing as satire.
Besides, they definitely aren't satirizing the seal itself. If they were, they'd probably be okay. But they're using the real seal.
They're satirizing the President and the office and symbols thereof. You're being far too specific. The seal is a symbol of the President, and is therefore a natural part of any satire that involves the President and his office. Not that I'm sure it's relevent anyway, because the point is that the laws concerning the seal have to do with people assuming that seeing the seal means that something is approved of by the President. Generally, with one or two exceptions (that again go back to realistic definitions of satire), nobody assumes the presense of a Presidential Seal in a clearly satirical story about the President means that the satire has in some way been blessed, not without careful positioning of the logo and the words "This satire is approved by President George W. Bush. No, really, honestly. This bit's not a joke" written next to it, anyway.
Those "protecting" the Presidential Seal need to get a sense of humour.
Ok, I got that point even if the GP didn't, but it strikes me as somewhat paranoid. How, exactly, do two terrorists communicate with "dynamic telephone numbers"? Do they dial all the numbers from 000-000-0000 to 999-999-9999 until they get their collegue, or how exactly?
In order for this scheme to work, at least one participant has to have a static telephone number or some location where the number is readily available, as much to the FBI as the terrorists. That phone, or location, or whatever, can be bugged.
The original interview contains the following quote:
The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won't work well on PCs.
The submitter has rewritten it as:
The inconvenience is that the [MPAA] got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won't work well on PCs.
Bill Gates' original is not represented by the totally unnecessary rewrite. The MPAA receives no protection from the Blu-Ray/HDDVD/etc CSS protections - it's an organization that represents movie studios, it does NOT produce content itself.
No, hold on. We weren't talking about doing absolutely anything to children. We were talking about allowing a child to see a pornographic magazine. Actually, I find it remarkable you'd conflate the two. Locking a kid in a basement or raping them is the same as showing them a picture of naked boobies? Huh? How did you come to that conclusion?
There's no debate whatsoever about physically abusing children. But you're telling me there's an actual law dictating what parents are allowed to show their children. I'm finding that hard to believe, and I'm not sure it's a good idea.
Oh right, it's illegal for a parent to give a copy of Hustler to a 7-year-old child.
Is it really? While I wouldn't advocate giving porn to 7 year olds, there's very definitely something that doesn't sound right about there being a law telling parents what type of content is ok to pass by their children.
GSM works fine out here in the country. CDMA's voice quality is awful, and has well documented issues about dropped calls when making peak-time phone calls inside buildings. CDMA is also a 1970s phone service with a 1990s digital spread spectrum thing bolted on, rather than a full, modern, digital mobile phone service with SIM cards, ISDN interoperability and functionality, and global position independence.
So go away, and tell your friends at Qualcomm to stop trolling here.
Most PAYG operators will allow you to keep your balance as long as you top up on a regular basis. Sometimes the top-up is absurd, other times it's quite reasonable. With Cingular, for example, a $25 top-up every three months will ensure you keep your unused credit.
I don't know of an operator in any country where you're not forced to do something that either implies adding money to your account or making a call that would spend money, on a periodic basis. If you believe that PAYG should include keeping an apparently defunct account open, then PAYG, as you describe it, simply does not exist.
Nope. Freedom Wireless relies entirely upon lawsuits. They're a group of patent lawyers, not a cellular service provider.
There are a couple of companies called Freedom Wireless operating in other parts of the world (a Telus Mobility dealership in Canada, a WiFi "solutions provider" in the UK), but neither are the company that constitute the subject of this article. This article talks a little more about them.
Cingular currently has a 25c/minute prepaid plan that needs a $25 top-up every three months. This is one of their current PAYG GoPhone options. If you're using 20-30 minutes a month and paying around $8 a month, this strikes me as close to identical to what you might be losing.
GoPhone, as it currently is, is a rebranding of several of AT&T, Cingular, BellSouth, etc's, old prepaid plans, plus Cingular and AT&T's GSM prepaid plans. I have a GoPhone PAYG SIM, and I can tell you the fact it works on regular GSM phones and the fact the phone knows the real number of the telephone when it does means it's highly unlikely that their current PAYG or PYP plans actually infringe upon the patents. The patents themselves generally cover a myriad of ways of implementing prepaid service, generally by either putting a bogus phone number in the cellphone, which forces incoming calls to be routed via a third party and makes it easy to identify prepaid callers, or by having the phone programmed to make 800 calls and route outgoing calls via that.
This probably explains Cingular's insistance that this will not affect the majority of their prepaid customers.
Interesting set of patents. They seem to rely upon either special numbers (virtual telephone numbers), or special programming in the phones, to identify the phones as prepaid.
I'm going to make a guess that the only GoPhone users affected by this are those on TDMA plans, as the GSM version's entirely compatable with regular GSM phones and doesn't do anything unusual with "virtual" phone numbers or anything else. Cingular rebranded a lot of its prepaid services GoPhone after it bought AT&T.
I'm 99% sure that the average RISCOS user has difficulty finding graphics cards that come with a RISCOS driver. I'd imagine, from their point of view, finding one where it does, but it only works on SlackRISCOS, but can easily be adapted by extracting the files and putting them in the right places for BlueCapRISCOS, would be a massive improvement...
So does everyone who wants to hire an auctioneer now need a license to auction? How non-sensical is that?
Nope. Anyone can hire an auctioneer, but the auctioneer needs to be licensed. You don't need the license, the auctioneer does.
BTW your spelling of nonsensical is, well, nonsensical... still, I bet at least something here's misspelt, so don't take it personally.
This is, quite literally, a stab at taxing the internet
No, it's a stab at implementing regulation that already exists in the offline world to the online world. In meatspace, if you sell something yourself and accept the highest offer, that's fine and unregulated. If you set yourself up as someone who sells on behalf of others, you generally have to follow certain laws aimed at consumer protection, ensuring your competence and that people who hire you know that you're a competent auctioneer. The same rules apply, say, for driving. If you want to drive other people around, commercially, you generally need some form of taxi driver's license. And most of us actually find that a good thing, we know the unlicensed cabby is the one who's likely to rip us off.
It's not a simple "They're trying to tax the interweb" thing. Far from it. There are dumb aspects, like the fact the training, right now, applies to meatspace auctions and contains portions irrelevent to online auctions. But the principle isn't as stupid as the kneejerk reactions from many on Slashdot say.
Who are you responding to? I never said the movies at the iTunes store have ads. RTFCYRT.
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Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!!
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by chris macura (899109) Alter Relationship on 2005-10-14 12:06 (#13791179)
The movies from the iTunes Store have no ADs. Read the fscking article!
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by squiggleslash (241428) on 2005-10-14 12:17
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Who are you responding to? I never said the movies at the iTunes store have ads. RTFCYRT.
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RIAA vs MPAA, Copyrights vs Patents, etc [slashdot.org]
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Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!!
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by chris macura (899109) Alter Relationship on 2005-10-14 12:06 (#13791179)
The movies from the iTunes Store have no ADs. Read the fscking article!
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Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!!
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by squiggleslash (241428) on 2005-10-14 12:17
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Who are you responding to? I never said the movies at the iTunes store have ads. RTFCYRT.
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RIAA vs MPAA, Copyrights vs Patents, etc [slashdot.org]
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Yes. I buy a lot of DVDs. I've only come across one or two lately where the ads were unskippable. The vast majority have no ads, or the ads are skippable.
Don't confuse a few exceptions for the norm. Unless you're a Disney freak, I suspect you've not bought that many DVDs with unskippable ads, or if you have, you've been unbelievably unlucky.
If I ever pay full price for a DVD and it has unskippable ads, I will return such a thing. As it is, I'm cheap. I made a policy of not paying more than $10 for a DVD with CSS encryption or region encoding, and preferably getting such DVDs used, some years ago, with the result that most of my DVDs are used rentals. Despite that these are the ones intended for the rental market, I'm getting relatively low hits on the ads counter. Draw your own conclusions.
Where are you reading it that the files can only be played on an iPod? My understanding was that you can watch anything you download on your computer. The iPod can also be used to view it on its screen, or on a television.
With cable and satellite, you (a) have access to content unobtainable via third parties and (b) have already bought the package. You're not buying each element.
I see it like this: If I had to buy an episode of the Simpsons, I would be thoroughly pissed off, and not want to buy any more, if they were sold as burdened with ads as the Sunday prime-time showing.
I expect ads in this media will be roughly the same, or better than, those on DVDs. DVDs tend to have a few, skippable, ads when the DVD starts (and often, not even that), and then the main feature is uninterrupted. That is a huge improvement upon TV.
Cable provides access to TV programmes you otherwise wouldn't receive.
What's the unique selling proposition of the iTunes Movie Store that would mean people would be willing to buy a TV programme for $2, infested with (presumably unskippable) ads, when they can tape that from the TV using their existing cable subscription (because this doesn't completely replace cable)?
I don't see it. Honestly, unless they keep the ads as unintrusive as possible, similar to that on a DVD (where the ads are usually at the beginning of the DVD and skippable in some way), I don't see people being willing to pay $2 for them.
i'm not sure what youre hate-on for Qualcomm is all about, but you're attributing my statements, those of the GSMA, and a GSM operator to them inappropriately. i've not heard anything out of Qualcomm regarding any sort of conspiracy.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here, especially in your comment that I have a "hate-on" for anyone. I never suggested you had talked to Qualcomm about a conspiracy, I said that they - at least their employees and ex-employees - have a tendency to attribute all sorts of things to a conspiracy on behalf of GSM. That's documented fact. Look at the writings on USENET of Steven DeBeste in groups like alt.cellular.sprintpcs as examples. The usual story is that GSM only got successful because the EU forced it upon operators, and is doing all it can to prevent IS-95 being adopted.
It's partially, in my view, such paranoia and such a failure to actually look at the real world that's leading IS-95 to remain very much the outsider. IS-95 has a superior air interface, but is otherwise equal to or lacking on pretty much all other fronts compared to GSM. Compared to UMTS, IS-95's air interface potentially solves some major issues associated with WCDMA, particularly the high bandwidth requirements of the latter, but it's not serious enough for UMTS to be considered as having major issues when new airspace licenses are being issued. All of this means, ultimately, that IS-95 needs to improve, or even (in my view, preferably) adopt most of GSM, rather than being the pointless contender. And, right now, that's not happening.
i suspect you mean something different by "mobility" than i do. the issue in Pakistan was that the CDMA licenses were originally given out on the condition of no mobility - that is, no cell-to-cell handoff, and a given device registered with only a single cell - and the operators in that space wanted the restrictions relaxes (and, admittedly, sort of acted ahead of the legal curve). the entrenched GSM operators contacted the GSMA for support in lobbying the government to ensure the restrictions stayed in place. note that the operators who launched CDMA service did so freely; they were given a technology-neutral license. they all went with CDMA because of lower density and capital investment requirements.
We are, obviously, having different definitions. I assumed you didn't mean mobility as in CDMA in Pakistan is fixed-wireless. I also misread your comment and thought you were saying personal-mobility had been forced upon, not forced away from, CDMA operators. I assumed you meant personal-mobility, that is the seperation of hardware from the subscriber, implemented in GSM and UMTS and better forms of CDMA in the form of a seperate card (SIM and USIM in GSM/UMTS) that contains the information necessary to identify and authenticate the subscriber.
I can't comment on the Pakistani situation because I don't know enough about it, but at a guess I'd suggest that it sounds like operators of fixed wireless networks, who were given spectrum to run fixed wireless services, wanted to expand and compete with cellular. Now, I can't comment on the situation there, but I know in Europe any operator that tried to do that would be governmentally lynched. Indeed, I suspect if a US television operator ceased transmitting television and decided to compete with cellular too, then that operator would get nailed by the FCC. And quite right too. I have difficulty believing that they bought licenses intended to operate cellular networks, and were then told they couldn't run cellular networks. That'd be dumb. There'd be lawsuits. Nobody would trust the Pakistani government again when buying spectrum.
and i'm not sure what sort of "freedom" and "advanced features" you believe the GSM network provides. commercially available data rates have been higher on CDMA networks for a few years now. okay, i'm not aware of any CDMA networks offering video calling, but given how limited this service is on G
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More specifically, regular analog, wired, phone service. ISDN isn't POTS, for example, but is delivered by landlines. (I guess VoIP is delivered by landlines too.)
The BBC hasn't been broken up (yet) ;)
There are others, but these are the most popular.
"3G" is little more than an attempt to extract more frequencies from governments by proposing they'll be necessary for a hypothetical future generation of mobile phones, which are assumed to provide video and high-speed Internet access. To call the entire concept fraud isn't far from the truth, but that said, governments have needed prodding as far as releasing their stranglehold on radio goes. Outside of government lobbying, it's a marketing term, with companies keen to portray their latest offering as 3G, usually redefining the term very few months so they can announce a minor upgrade as "3G" each time they do one.
So, no, 3G is not a standard. Looking at one of the links an earlier poster mentioned, it looks like Japan is getting UMTS via Vodafone (UMTS is essentially 3G GSM), FOMA, and CDMA2000, to add to 2G PDC and PHS. Can't comment on FOMA. CDMA2000 is an incremental enhancement to the US IS-95 standard, which in practical terms is barely a second generation standard (IS-95's essentially a digital version of AMPS, the old analog standard in the US, and is deployed largely because it's cheap - and I mean that in every sense of the word) the only "nice" part is the air interface technology, and seems - for the most part - to be incompatable with the rest of the world for the sake of doing so.) UMTS is, by all accounts, pretty good - all the benefits of GSM with improved data rates and capacity - as long as Vodafone over there do not screw up, you're not "far behind" with phones. You'll at least have UMTS, and have the CDMA2000 people pushing the UMTS people in terms of prices.
If something ceases to be satire the moment one person takes it seriously, then there's no such thing as satire.
They're satirizing the President and the office and symbols thereof. You're being far too specific. The seal is a symbol of the President, and is therefore a natural part of any satire that involves the President and his office. Not that I'm sure it's relevent anyway, because the point is that the laws concerning the seal have to do with people assuming that seeing the seal means that something is approved of by the President. Generally, with one or two exceptions (that again go back to realistic definitions of satire), nobody assumes the presense of a Presidential Seal in a clearly satirical story about the President means that the satire has in some way been blessed, not without careful positioning of the logo and the words "This satire is approved by President George W. Bush. No, really, honestly. This bit's not a joke" written next to it, anyway.Those "protecting" the Presidential Seal need to get a sense of humour.
In order for this scheme to work, at least one participant has to have a static telephone number or some location where the number is readily available, as much to the FBI as the terrorists. That phone, or location, or whatever, can be bugged.
The submitter is a Slashbot moron.
There's no debate whatsoever about physically abusing children. But you're telling me there's an actual law dictating what parents are allowed to show their children. I'm finding that hard to believe, and I'm not sure it's a good idea.
GSM works fine out here in the country. CDMA's voice quality is awful, and has well documented issues about dropped calls when making peak-time phone calls inside buildings. CDMA is also a 1970s phone service with a 1990s digital spread spectrum thing bolted on, rather than a full, modern, digital mobile phone service with SIM cards, ISDN interoperability and functionality, and global position independence.
So go away, and tell your friends at Qualcomm to stop trolling here.
I don't know of an operator in any country where you're not forced to do something that either implies adding money to your account or making a call that would spend money, on a periodic basis. If you believe that PAYG should include keeping an apparently defunct account open, then PAYG, as you describe it, simply does not exist.
There are a couple of companies called Freedom Wireless operating in other parts of the world (a Telus Mobility dealership in Canada, a WiFi "solutions provider" in the UK), but neither are the company that constitute the subject of this article. This article talks a little more about them.
Cingular currently has a 25c/minute prepaid plan that needs a $25 top-up every three months. This is one of their current PAYG GoPhone options. If you're using 20-30 minutes a month and paying around $8 a month, this strikes me as close to identical to what you might be losing.
None of the patents have anything to do with Internet access, they're all about prepaid cellular telephony.
GoPhone, as it currently is, is a rebranding of several of AT&T, Cingular, BellSouth, etc's, old prepaid plans, plus Cingular and AT&T's GSM prepaid plans. I have a GoPhone PAYG SIM, and I can tell you the fact it works on regular GSM phones and the fact the phone knows the real number of the telephone when it does means it's highly unlikely that their current PAYG or PYP plans actually infringe upon the patents. The patents themselves generally cover a myriad of ways of implementing prepaid service, generally by either putting a bogus phone number in the cellphone, which forces incoming calls to be routed via a third party and makes it easy to identify prepaid callers, or by having the phone programmed to make 800 calls and route outgoing calls via that.
This probably explains Cingular's insistance that this will not affect the majority of their prepaid customers.
I'm going to make a guess that the only GoPhone users affected by this are those on TDMA plans, as the GSM version's entirely compatable with regular GSM phones and doesn't do anything unusual with "virtual" phone numbers or anything else. Cingular rebranded a lot of its prepaid services GoPhone after it bought AT&T.
Who are you responding to? I never said the movies at the iTunes store have ads. RTFCYRT.
I'm 99% sure that the average RISCOS user has difficulty finding graphics cards that come with a RISCOS driver. I'd imagine, from their point of view, finding one where it does, but it only works on SlackRISCOS, but can easily be adapted by extracting the files and putting them in the right places for BlueCapRISCOS, would be a massive improvement...
BTW your spelling of nonsensical is, well, nonsensical... still, I bet at least something here's misspelt, so don't take it personally.
No, it's a stab at implementing regulation that already exists in the offline world to the online world. In meatspace, if you sell something yourself and accept the highest offer, that's fine and unregulated. If you set yourself up as someone who sells on behalf of others, you generally have to follow certain laws aimed at consumer protection, ensuring your competence and that people who hire you know that you're a competent auctioneer. The same rules apply, say, for driving. If you want to drive other people around, commercially, you generally need some form of taxi driver's license. And most of us actually find that a good thing, we know the unlicensed cabby is the one who's likely to rip us off.It's not a simple "They're trying to tax the interweb" thing. Far from it. There are dumb aspects, like the fact the training, right now, applies to meatspace auctions and contains portions irrelevent to online auctions. But the principle isn't as stupid as the kneejerk reactions from many on Slashdot say.
Not necessarily. He might just be trying to keep the slugs off his keyboard.
Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator. Reply to: Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!! * Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!! (Score:1) by chris macura (899109) Alter Relationship on 2005-10-14 12:06 (#13791179) The movies from the iTunes Store have no ADs. Read the fscking article! [ Reply to This ] Post Comment Preview Comment * Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!! (Score:?) by squiggleslash (241428) on 2005-10-14 12:17 (Last Journal: 2005-10-13 11:12) Who are you responding to? I never said the movies at the iTunes store have ads. RTFCYRT. -- RIAA vs MPAA, Copyrights vs Patents, etc [slashdot.org] Edit Comment Name squiggleslash [ Log Out ] Subject Comment Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator. Reply to: Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!! * Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!! (Score:1) by chris macura (899109) Alter Relationship on 2005-10-14 12:06 (#13791179) The movies from the iTunes Store have no ADs. Read the fscking article! [ Reply to This ] Post Comment Preview Comment * Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!! (Score:?) by squiggleslash (241428) on 2005-10-14 12:17 (Last Journal: 2005-10-13 11:12) Who are you responding to? I never said the movies at the iTunes store have ads. RTFCYRT. -- RIAA vs MPAA, Copyrights vs Patents, etc [slashdot.org] Edit Comment Name squiggleslash [ Log Out ] Subject Comment
Don't confuse a few exceptions for the norm. Unless you're a Disney freak, I suspect you've not bought that many DVDs with unskippable ads, or if you have, you've been unbelievably unlucky.
If I ever pay full price for a DVD and it has unskippable ads, I will return such a thing. As it is, I'm cheap. I made a policy of not paying more than $10 for a DVD with CSS encryption or region encoding, and preferably getting such DVDs used, some years ago, with the result that most of my DVDs are used rentals. Despite that these are the ones intended for the rental market, I'm getting relatively low hits on the ads counter. Draw your own conclusions.
Where are you reading it that the files can only be played on an iPod? My understanding was that you can watch anything you download on your computer. The iPod can also be used to view it on its screen, or on a television.
I see it like this: If I had to buy an episode of the Simpsons, I would be thoroughly pissed off, and not want to buy any more, if they were sold as burdened with ads as the Sunday prime-time showing.
I expect ads in this media will be roughly the same, or better than, those on DVDs. DVDs tend to have a few, skippable, ads when the DVD starts (and often, not even that), and then the main feature is uninterrupted. That is a huge improvement upon TV.
What's the unique selling proposition of the iTunes Movie Store that would mean people would be willing to buy a TV programme for $2, infested with (presumably unskippable) ads, when they can tape that from the TV using their existing cable subscription (because this doesn't completely replace cable)?
I don't see it. Honestly, unless they keep the ads as unintrusive as possible, similar to that on a DVD (where the ads are usually at the beginning of the DVD and skippable in some way), I don't see people being willing to pay $2 for them.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here, especially in your comment that I have a "hate-on" for anyone. I never suggested you had talked to Qualcomm about a conspiracy, I said that they - at least their employees and ex-employees - have a tendency to attribute all sorts of things to a conspiracy on behalf of GSM. That's documented fact. Look at the writings on USENET of Steven DeBeste in groups like alt.cellular.sprintpcs as examples. The usual story is that GSM only got successful because the EU forced it upon operators, and is doing all it can to prevent IS-95 being adopted.
It's partially, in my view, such paranoia and such a failure to actually look at the real world that's leading IS-95 to remain very much the outsider. IS-95 has a superior air interface, but is otherwise equal to or lacking on pretty much all other fronts compared to GSM. Compared to UMTS, IS-95's air interface potentially solves some major issues associated with WCDMA, particularly the high bandwidth requirements of the latter, but it's not serious enough for UMTS to be considered as having major issues when new airspace licenses are being issued. All of this means, ultimately, that IS-95 needs to improve, or even (in my view, preferably) adopt most of GSM, rather than being the pointless contender. And, right now, that's not happening.
We are, obviously, having different definitions. I assumed you didn't mean mobility as in CDMA in Pakistan is fixed-wireless. I also misread your comment and thought you were saying personal-mobility had been forced upon, not forced away from, CDMA operators. I assumed you meant personal-mobility, that is the seperation of hardware from the subscriber, implemented in GSM and UMTS and better forms of CDMA in the form of a seperate card (SIM and USIM in GSM/UMTS) that contains the information necessary to identify and authenticate the subscriber.
I can't comment on the Pakistani situation because I don't know enough about it, but at a guess I'd suggest that it sounds like operators of fixed wireless networks, who were given spectrum to run fixed wireless services, wanted to expand and compete with cellular. Now, I can't comment on the situation there, but I know in Europe any operator that tried to do that would be governmentally lynched. Indeed, I suspect if a US television operator ceased transmitting television and decided to compete with cellular too, then that operator would get nailed by the FCC. And quite right too. I have difficulty believing that they bought licenses intended to operate cellular networks, and were then told they couldn't run cellular networks. That'd be dumb. There'd be lawsuits. Nobody would trust the Pakistani government again when buying spectrum.