Re:How long before they pull out of the US?
on
Vodafone Quitting Japan
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
With quad-band or multi-band phones the frequency difference on the handset side is not that bad.
A more difficult thing for Vodafone is that the infrastructure side is fully different.
The services Vodafone can provide their customers in the US is different from what
they can offer in the rest of the world and their services do not cross the different networks.
They can not build a global brand which is also visible in that they do not promote the name
Vodafone in the US.
If there is no economy of scale and no Brand benefit in a presence on the US market the investment only makes sense if they get a higher return on the US investment than what they pay in interest on all the money they have borrowed to build the rest of their network.
Vodafone also have a stake in a CDMA network in the US. How long before they divest that as well? When they are backing 3GSM in the rest of the world it seems odd to have a stake in CDMA in the US.
What would be the benefit of making the replacement system re-useable?
The major part of any launcher will be fuel that will be re-cycled in the atmosphere anyway.
The target of a new system must be to be cheap and reliable. If this target is most easily reached by making the system re-useable then do that. If re-qualification and repair is more expensive than building a new launcher from scratch then drop the re-useable part or melt the returned launcher and re-use it as beer-cans.
Where to get a three-butten mouse with no roller?
on
Top Mice Compared
·
· Score: 1
Am I the only one who dislikes the roller-type
three-butten rodents and is having trouble finding
normal three-butten ones these days?
I calculated somewhere else that one naeoahh equals 50.000 times 280x280nm or six times 114x114nm. (calculating six transistors pr. SRAM cell, if they use four they are cheats and robbers)
The problem with E-beam is that it is a serial process. In effect you have to draw every single transistor using a megnetic field to move the electron beam.
What makes IC manufacturing in general manufacturable is the fact that you are using photo lithography with an optical mask through which you expose the wafer. This is a parallel process whereas E-beam, which can be good for engineering samples, sucks for manufacturability.
I have often thought about writing an RFC for around April 1st for a method for backing up data by cross-posting it encrypted on news-groups.
The idea would be something like making an archive of your data and then splitting it up in a large number of smaller packages using data interleaving between the packages and the use of error correcting codes like Reed-Solomon to overcome loss of individual packages. The system should then cross-post the data to a wide selection of news-groups and re-post messages as news-groups die or moderators remove posts.
A way of making the messages live longer and not be banned from posting so fast would be to use steganography to hide the data inside other data.
Wait!. It might be that my idea is not new at all. This is the real explanation behind all the Viagra spam on news-net;-)
I think your microwave oven is going to be very unhappy about moving from the ISM band where it is currently transmitting (2.4 GHz is a ressonance for water in frozen burgers) to wherever a dynamic system would want to put it.
Likewise it will be unpractical to replace all the everyday narrow-band antennas you see around you (stub or pifa on a mobile phone, slot antennas for basestations, ferrite coil for a cheapo am reciever etc etc.) to some big wide-band structures that would cover everything from DC to blue light. I for one would hate to carry it around.
Also a lot of recievers/transmitters can be buildt on the cheap because their frequencies are fixed. Garage door openers or remotes for toys are these day buildt with SAW resonators that are fixed at one frequency. If you want to replace them with big systems using multiple frequencies you can kiss cheap stuff good-bye.
wifi is a spread spectrum system allready, your problem is that you bought the propaganda about limitless bandwidth in a finite spectrum.
If the myth of CDMA or the myth of ultra-wideband were true, why would you then need any more spectrum than what is allready available in the ISM band?
I like your point. Especially since "Every sufficiently advanced form of communication is indistinguishable from white noise". Unless the punters transmitting in the band are waisting bandwidth by adding redundancy that can be detected, or you know what you are looking for, there is no way of detecting whether a Sufficiently advanced communication is going on.
It should be possible to mod a link down. This Skytel page is the most blatent pseudo-scientific propaganda I have come around in a long time.
How can true nerds accept a phrase like: "Well in this page we do not see a need of detailed explanation of technical specifications of CDMA and GSM, which, frankly, few of us really can understand." What an insult to the readers intelligence. There is nothing complicated about cellular telephony that people who know what they are talking about cannot explain to folks with basic high school physics background.
However, CDMA technology checks 800 times per second its transmission level. Therefore, radiation level is 10 times less than AMPS and GSM. Smart, isn't it?
The output power levels have nothing to do with the speed of the power control loop. GSM and CDMA2k alike adjusts the output power according to the signal quality at the base-station, GSM transmits in short bursts, CDMA2k transmits continuously, the average power is comparable and in a well covered network with small cells boths systems will transmit power far below the max power level anyway.
I forgot to complain about the parent posts claim regarding radiation level:
the radiation level is 10x less than AMPS and GSM. while as you say the amount we get is already very small, but this isn't just cutting it in half, it's several orders lower.
The main difference is that with CDMA2k you have continuous transmission, with GSM and GSM EDGE you have bursted transmission with a duty cycle of 12.5% for full rate and 6.25% for half-rate voice codecs.
For 2W peak power you would be down to 250mW or 125mW max power when you consider the duty cycle. What is important is the energy pr. bit, and that is not that different between the two systems.
Also you are not likely to transmit at full power neither in CDMA2k nor in GSM. The basestation will continuously monitor the signal strength from the mobile and command it to reduce transmitted power until the S/N at the basestation is just sufficient for decoding. This improves the spectrum efficiency by allowing faster frequency re-use and it improves your handsets battery life as well.
One problem in CDMA is that the basestation needs to transmit the same power level to all handsets, it can not reduce the transmitted power to handsets with good reception. One bozo with aluminium foil over the antenna will force the basestation to increase transmitted power to all handsets. In GSM the basestation would only need to boost power to the one bozo, not to all the other users. This can damage the spectrum efficiency of CDMA based systems in down-link.
Not just 50%, but several orders of magnitude higher.
GSM 56Kbps
CDMA2000 2Mbps
As others have allready mentioned that is not a meaningfull comparison. With GSM Phase 2+ you have a max data rate of 384 kb/s (EDGE) and with Phase 3 you have 2Mb/s with the UTRAN (W-CDMA) air interface and 384 kb/s with the GERAN (EDGE) air interface.
Both are likely to be furter developed in future GSM standards releases.
You have to look at what you can get out of your handsets and datacards today with comparable cost, coverage and conveniance. AFAIK you can get an AT&T GSM (EDGE) datacard with 192 kb/s full duplex data capability. This is available today and I dont think it is that much different with what the CDMA2k camp is boasting. I do think you get the benefits of the AT&T one with global roaming, SIM card and global messaging (SMS, MMS). What is the up-side of the CDMA2k?
Why don't people make enough effort to use the correct prefix, and respect the great works of honoured scientists by capitalizing their names correctly?
I second that, especially such honoured scientists as Dr Mega and Dr Hertz.;-)
It is a difficult tradeoff between spectrum efficiency and coverage. A 150 MHz system would more or less cover New York City in one cell. On the surface this is cool, but it limits the available traffic.
In a city the size of NYC you might have mighty many police, firefighter, ambulance driver, national guard, Boy Scouts of America, etc etc that all have good reason to communicate with each other in case of an emergency. If you have a system that can only accomodate say 10000 calls at the time, that might not be enough for such a large population.
800 MHz will penetrate walls and buildings (You do have cell-phone coverage also in-doors) but you need a lot more antennas and smaller cell-sizes to get the coverage. This should not be a problem in urban areas since the cost of more cells is divided between more people.
It is a problem if the cells are not configured properly or if all antenna's in a local area is mounted say on top of the structure that is destroyed in an emergency. The system should be configured so the cells overlap and can withstand the fall-out of individual cells.
Dual band equipment could be an attractive feature, even though carrying a 150 MHz antenna around would ruin the Armani suits of most of the MIB.
IDEN is a proprietary Motorola system afaik only used by NEXTEL.
Until 10 min ago I thought IDEN was using the same 800 MHz frequency band as all the other cellular standards in the US (AMPS, GSM, US-TDMA, CDMA) namely: Mobile transmit 824-849 MHz and Mobile Receive 869-894 MHz.
It looks like IDEN/NEXTEL for some obscure reason is using a lower frequency band namely: Mobile transmit 806-825 MHz and Mobile Receive 851-870 MHz. What a mess, why were they allowed to use these frequencies in the first place?
IDEN mobile transmit: 806-825 MHz
IDEN mobile receive: 851-870 MHz
US cellular transmit: 824-849 MHz
US cellular receive: 869-894 MHz
No wonder IDEN can cause problems the "normal" US cellular systems cannot.
One thing that could make patents on software a little more palatable would be to reduce the protection period to something that makes a little more sense on internet time. If a software patent was valid for say 3 years after filing this should give a good head start to any bright ideas and make it possible for the market to get full interoperability/documentation within reasonable time.
Software is well protected by copyright that even extends beyond the 20 years protection you get by a patent.
The idea with patents is to make ideas public so others can expand on them and after a grace period (20 years in most cases) be used freely by everybody. Software on the other hand like litterature, paintings, poems etc. have been protected by copyright. The benefit of this have been that you do not need to file a costly patent application and your work is protected for much longer. This is in many cases much stronger than a patent, especially for software where I find it difficult to come up with any good examples of ideas worth patenting.
In Europe you have until now not been able to patent algorithms etc since mathematics have been considered a nature phenomenon that can be discovered but not invented.
The problem with mandates like this is that it, in a way, sanctions monopoly
As long as everybody is entitled to participate I dont see how such a mandate can be said to sanction a monopoly.
The customer defines the rules, and in this case the rules are that the customer wants to purchase a solution where it gets full control of the application after the purchase. The government might want to be able to maintain the application indefinitely and would like to be able to award contracts for maintenance and up-grades in an open tender at a later date.
No-one bars Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc. from participating. The problem for M$ and enemies (I couldn't really write M$ and friends, could I?) is that currently they do not want to participate under those terms.
If M$ had offered Munich a solution using Gnu/BSD and OpenOffice it is not impossible that they would have won the tender. If Microsoft had offered to improve OpenOffice import/export filters as part of the deal, they might even have had a very good chance of winning since they should be able to write better filters than anybody else, having access to MOffice sourcecode.
M$ did not want to offer such a solution though since it would further undermine its monopoly.
When your market goes away, you as a company have to evolve in order to survive. Successfull companies are the ones that are good at adapting. 15 years ago IBM had 150000 employees who were very good at selling typewriters. In 1992, a Finnish company (Nokia) was a conglomerate with a business model of producing toilet paper, pulp and rubber boots and selling these products to the Soviet Union in exchange for iron ore, oil, berries etc. Nokia could then sell these products in the west for profit. When they closed the Soviet Union, this business model evaporated overnight. Both companies have succeded in not only surviving but also to thrive and move themselves into new fields of business.
I wonder whether M$ will be able to reinvent itself as successfully when its market goes away.
I think it makes sense to post comments in more
or less readable English, but to exclude an interesting link to a story just because it is not written in the Kings English makes little sense.
In Europe, especially in "New Europe" (Baltic and Eastern European countries, Russia), German is
widely spoken and even more widely understood. Similar cases could be made for French in "Old Europe" and Spanish in the Americas (&Spain;-).
Using a link to an English page is great when such a link exist, but it would be silly to ignore a great story just because it is not available in English.
Slashdot Mirror
With quad-band or multi-band phones the frequency difference on the handset side is not that bad.
A more difficult thing for Vodafone is that the infrastructure side is fully different.
The services Vodafone can provide their customers in the US is different from what they can offer in the rest of the world and their services do not cross the different networks. They can not build a global brand which is also visible in that they do not promote the name Vodafone in the US.
If there is no economy of scale and no Brand benefit in a presence on the US market the investment only makes sense if they get a higher return on the US investment than what they pay in interest on all the money they have borrowed to build the rest of their network.
Vodafone also have a stake in a CDMA network in the US. How long before they divest that as well? When they are backing 3GSM in the rest of the world it seems odd to have a stake in CDMA in the US.
What would be the benefit of making the replacement system re-useable?
The major part of any launcher will be fuel that will be re-cycled in the atmosphere anyway.
The target of a new system must be to be cheap and reliable. If this target is most easily reached by making the system re-useable then do that. If re-qualification and repair is more expensive than building a new launcher from scratch then drop the re-useable part or melt the returned launcher and re-use it as beer-cans.
Am I the only one who dislikes the roller-type three-butten rodents and is having trouble finding normal three-butten ones these days?
I like your unit ;-)
I calculated somewhere else that one naeoahh equals 50.000 times 280x280nm or six times 114x114nm. (calculating six transistors pr. SRAM cell, if they use four they are cheats and robbers)
The problem with E-beam is that it is a serial process. In effect you have to draw every single transistor using a megnetic field to move the electron beam.
What makes IC manufacturing in general manufacturable is the fact that you are using photo lithography with an optical mask through which you expose the wafer. This is a parallel process whereas E-beam, which can be good for engineering samples, sucks for manufacturability.
I hate to reply to my own post but a back of the envelope calculation makes that 280x280nm. Cool even if this is a little beyond practical.
They say 50.000 at the end of a human hair. Do anybody know the actual size of this cell?
They say a combination involving E-beam. That do not smell like mass production.
cute :-)
I have often thought about writing an RFC for around April 1st for a method for backing up data by cross-posting it encrypted on news-groups.
The idea would be something like making an archive of your data and then splitting it up in a large number of smaller packages using data interleaving between the packages and the use of error correcting codes like Reed-Solomon to overcome loss of individual packages. The system should then cross-post the data to a wide selection of news-groups and re-post messages as news-groups die or moderators remove posts.
A way of making the messages live longer and not be banned from posting so fast would be to use steganography to hide the data inside other data.
Wait!. It might be that my idea is not new at all. This is the real explanation behind all the Viagra spam on news-net ;-)
I dont get it, where I live stamps still cost the same. A 10 cent stamp have been for sale for a dime as long as I can remember
I think your microwave oven is going to be very unhappy about moving from the ISM band where it is currently transmitting (2.4 GHz is a ressonance for water in frozen burgers) to wherever a dynamic system would want to put it.
Likewise it will be unpractical to replace all the everyday narrow-band antennas you see around you (stub or pifa on a mobile phone, slot antennas for basestations, ferrite coil for a cheapo am reciever etc etc.) to some big wide-band structures that would cover everything from DC to blue light. I for one would hate to carry it around.
Also a lot of recievers/transmitters can be buildt on the cheap because their frequencies are fixed. Garage door openers or remotes for toys are these day buildt with SAW resonators that are fixed at one frequency. If you want to replace them with big systems using multiple frequencies you can kiss cheap stuff good-bye.
wifi is a spread spectrum system allready, your problem is that you bought the propaganda about limitless bandwidth in a finite spectrum.
If the myth of CDMA or the myth of ultra-wideband were true, why would you then need any more spectrum than what is allready available in the ISM band?
I like your point. Especially since "Every sufficiently advanced form of communication is indistinguishable from white noise". Unless the punters transmitting in the band are waisting bandwidth by adding redundancy that can be detected, or you know what you are looking for, there is no way of detecting whether a Sufficiently advanced communication is going on.
It should be possible to mod a link down. This Skytel page is the most blatent pseudo-scientific propaganda I have come around in a long time.
How can true nerds accept a phrase like: "Well in this page we do not see a need of detailed explanation of technical specifications of CDMA and GSM, which, frankly, few of us really can understand." What an insult to the readers intelligence. There is nothing complicated about cellular telephony that people who know what they are talking about cannot explain to folks with basic high school physics background.
However, CDMA technology checks 800 times per second its transmission level. Therefore, radiation level is 10 times less than AMPS and GSM. Smart, isn't it?
The output power levels have nothing to do with the speed of the power control loop. GSM and CDMA2k alike adjusts the output power according to the signal quality at the base-station, GSM transmits in short bursts, CDMA2k transmits continuously, the average power is comparable and in a well covered network with small cells boths systems will transmit power far below the max power level anyway.
I forgot to complain about the parent posts claim regarding radiation level:
the radiation level is 10x less than AMPS and GSM. while as you say the amount we get is already very small, but this isn't just cutting it in half, it's several orders lower.
The main difference is that with CDMA2k you have continuous transmission, with GSM and GSM EDGE you have bursted transmission with a duty cycle of 12.5% for full rate and 6.25% for half-rate voice codecs.
For 2W peak power you would be down to 250mW or 125mW max power when you consider the duty cycle. What is important is the energy pr. bit, and that is not that different between the two systems.
Also you are not likely to transmit at full power neither in CDMA2k nor in GSM. The basestation will continuously monitor the signal strength from the mobile and command it to reduce transmitted power until the S/N at the basestation is just sufficient for decoding. This improves the spectrum efficiency by allowing faster frequency re-use and it improves your handsets battery life as well.
One problem in CDMA is that the basestation needs to transmit the same power level to all handsets, it can not reduce the transmitted power to handsets with good reception. One bozo with aluminium foil over the antenna will force the basestation to increase transmitted power to all handsets. In GSM the basestation would only need to boost power to the one bozo, not to all the other users. This can damage the spectrum efficiency of CDMA based systems in down-link.
Not just 50%, but several orders of magnitude higher.
GSM 56Kbps
CDMA2000 2Mbps
As others have allready mentioned that is not a meaningfull comparison. With GSM Phase 2+ you have a max data rate of 384 kb/s (EDGE) and with Phase 3 you have 2Mb/s with the UTRAN (W-CDMA) air interface and 384 kb/s with the GERAN (EDGE) air interface.
Both are likely to be furter developed in future GSM standards releases.
You have to look at what you can get out of your handsets and datacards today with comparable cost, coverage and conveniance. AFAIK you can get an AT&T GSM (EDGE) datacard with 192 kb/s full duplex data capability. This is available today and I dont think it is that much different with what the CDMA2k camp is boasting. I do think you get the benefits of the AT&T one with global roaming, SIM card and global messaging (SMS, MMS). What is the up-side of the CDMA2k?
I second that, especially such honoured scientists as Dr Mega and Dr Hertz. ;-)
It is a difficult tradeoff between spectrum efficiency and coverage. A 150 MHz system would more or less cover New York City in one cell. On the surface this is cool, but it limits the available traffic.
In a city the size of NYC you might have mighty many police, firefighter, ambulance driver, national guard, Boy Scouts of America, etc etc that all have good reason to communicate with each other in case of an emergency. If you have a system that can only accomodate say 10000 calls at the time, that might not be enough for such a large population.
800 MHz will penetrate walls and buildings (You do have cell-phone coverage also in-doors) but you need a lot more antennas and smaller cell-sizes to get the coverage. This should not be a problem in urban areas since the cost of more cells is divided between more people.
It is a problem if the cells are not configured properly or if all antenna's in a local area is mounted say on top of the structure that is destroyed in an emergency. The system should be configured so the cells overlap and can withstand the fall-out of individual cells.
Dual band equipment could be an attractive feature, even though carrying a 150 MHz antenna around would ruin the Armani suits of most of the MIB.
IDEN is a proprietary Motorola system afaik only used by NEXTEL.
Until 10 min ago I thought IDEN was using the same 800 MHz frequency band as all the other cellular standards in the US (AMPS, GSM, US-TDMA, CDMA) namely: Mobile transmit 824-849 MHz and Mobile Receive 869-894 MHz.
It looks like IDEN/NEXTEL for some obscure reason is using a lower frequency band namely: Mobile transmit 806-825 MHz and Mobile Receive 851-870 MHz. What a mess, why were they allowed to use these frequencies in the first place?
IDEN mobile transmit: 806-825 MHz
IDEN mobile receive: 851-870 MHz
US cellular transmit: 824-849 MHz
US cellular receive: 869-894 MHz
No wonder IDEN can cause problems the "normal" US cellular systems cannot.
For laughs I threw in some other frequencies.
World cellular transmit: 880-915 MHz (GSM900)
World cellular receive: 925-960 MHz (GSM900)
US PCS transmit: 1850-1910 MHz
US PCS receive: 1930-1990 MHz
World hi-band transmit:1710-1785 MHz (GSM1800)
World hi-band receive: 1805-1880 MHz (GSM1800)
UMTS transmit: 1920-2170 MHz (blocked in the US)
UMTS receive: 2110-2170 MHz (Blocked in the US)
One thing that could make patents on software a little more palatable would be to reduce the protection period to something that makes a little more sense on internet time. If a software patent was valid for say 3 years after filing this should give a good head start to any bright ideas and make it possible for the market to get full interoperability/documentation within reasonable time.
Software is well protected by copyright that even extends beyond the 20 years protection you get by a patent.
The idea with patents is to make ideas public so others can expand on them and after a grace period (20 years in most cases) be used freely by everybody. Software on the other hand like litterature, paintings, poems etc. have been protected by copyright. The benefit of this have been that you do not need to file a costly patent application and your work is protected for much longer. This is in many cases much stronger than a patent, especially for software where I find it difficult to come up with any good examples of ideas worth patenting.
In Europe you have until now not been able to patent algorithms etc since mathematics have been considered a nature phenomenon that can be discovered but not invented.
The ban of supersonic flight stems back from the Concorde days. With Concorde out of business the ban is obsolete.
If Boing comes up with a supersonic commercial plane before Airbus I am quite sure the ban would be lifted.
As long as everybody is entitled to participate I dont see how such a mandate can be said to sanction a monopoly.
The customer defines the rules, and in this case the rules are that the customer wants to purchase a solution where it gets full control of the application after the purchase. The government might want to be able to maintain the application indefinitely and would like to be able to award contracts for maintenance and up-grades in an open tender at a later date.
No-one bars Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc. from participating. The problem for M$ and enemies (I couldn't really write M$ and friends, could I?) is that currently they do not want to participate under those terms.
If M$ had offered Munich a solution using Gnu/BSD and OpenOffice it is not impossible that they would have won the tender. If Microsoft had offered to improve OpenOffice import/export filters as part of the deal, they might even have had a very good chance of winning since they should be able to write better filters than anybody else, having access to MOffice sourcecode.
M$ did not want to offer such a solution though since it would further undermine its monopoly.
When your market goes away, you as a company have to evolve in order to survive. Successfull companies are the ones that are good at adapting. 15 years ago IBM had 150000 employees who were very good at selling typewriters. In 1992, a Finnish company (Nokia) was a conglomerate with a business model of producing toilet paper, pulp and rubber boots and selling these products to the Soviet Union in exchange for iron ore, oil, berries etc. Nokia could then sell these products in the west for profit. When they closed the Soviet Union, this business model evaporated overnight. Both companies have succeded in not only surviving but also to thrive and move themselves into new fields of business.
I wonder whether M$ will be able to reinvent itself as successfully when its market goes away.
I think it makes sense to post comments in more or less readable English, but to exclude an interesting link to a story just because it is not written in the Kings English makes little sense.
In Europe, especially in "New Europe" (Baltic and Eastern European countries, Russia), German is widely spoken and even more widely understood. Similar cases could be made for French in "Old Europe" and Spanish in the Americas (&Spain ;-).
Using a link to an English page is great when such a link exist, but it would be silly to ignore a great story just because it is not available in English.