CDMA, Cell Phone Standards And Who "Wins" 516
Fubar writes "Former Qualcomm engineer Steven Den Beste, Captain of the USS Clueless outlines why he thinks the US is primed to overtake Europe and Japan as the technological leader in cell phone technology. He argues it stems from open competition and the use of CDMA."
Only If... (Score:4, Funny)
Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:4, Insightful)
The phrase "widely optimistic" comes to mind. "Open", this would be describing CDMA v GSM how ? GSM is used in Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia, Australia, and now in large parts of the US. Competition is between a large number of international firms based around the globe in a number of different countries and competing in vastly different markets with differing pressures.
CDMA, US and what is it, one other country. Companies almost exclusively based in the US.
Maybe Japan and Europe will lose the current massive advantage they have in Mobile technology, its possible, after all the US is only 2 years or so behind Europe which is 2 years behind Japan.
And anyone who thinks that doing CDMA helps WCDMA is living in the clouds. Who are the large phone companies in the US, Vodaphone, T-Mobile any one ? And who owns them.... What are the most popular handsets ?
Companies in the US will survive but don't except them to thrive, unless of course protectionism comes in to prevent fair competition.
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see it. Europe and Japan have higher population densities and smaller administrative areas, so can economically have much higher densities of cells for a given area. Handsets can't get much smaller before they start to have interface problems, so competition is on features. In the US, unless someone is willing to provide a major-metro-area-only service, handsets are going to need much more power, hence larger batteries, and less room for technological extras, before handsets get too larger.
Also, I'm unimpressed with the rhetoric in this article. He basks in schadenfreude because something his rivals claimed to be unworkable did actually work, then turns around and says what they want to do is unworkable. But he's absolutely right that the European approach of homogenization by diktat from Brussels is bound to fail, particularly after the windfall taxes imposed on the telcos by the governments, disguised as the 3G license fee.
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I'm getting a little tired of this whine. In most European countries the 3G spectrum was auctioned. If the license fees are exorbitant, then the only ones to blame are the participants in the auction.
They all should have known the price they could bear based on profit forecasts, and not gone over that. If they had all done that instead of bidding up each other like headless chickens, they wouldn't be up to their ears in debt now.
The telcos have noone to blame but themselves for their problems, and I am sick that one after the other they're asking for government bailouts. Why the heck did we privatise them in the first place if we end up paying for their mistakes anyway?
MartRe:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:4, Interesting)
The telcos were trapped between a rock and a hard place. Fail to win a licence and the stock market would kill you quickly, win one and your own debts would kill you slowly. They all opted for the slow death hoping that they had bought enough time to figure something out.
The telcos have noone to blame but themselves for their problems, and I am sick that one after the other they're asking for government bailouts. Why the heck did we privatise them in the first place if we end up paying for their mistakes anyway?
The fault is the government's, because it did not structure the process to get citizens the best possible service, but to maximize revenue for itself. A better solution would have been a competitive tender or "beauty contest", in which the best technical and economic solutions, indepenently assessed, won. The only winners were the government treasuries, and their appetites are insatiable.
They wouldn't have needed a "bail out" if they were free to do business, but as it is, they are strangled by over-regulation out of Brussels and taxation at home. Privatization is pointless if the private owners aren't free to run the company as they see fit without interference.
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion the telcos were not trapped between a rock and a hard place, because they all faced the same problem. Therefore if they had been run with anything resembling business sense, they would have known what the maximum viable bid for a license was, and moreover, what the maximum viable bid was for their competitors.
This was a classic case of how not to play Prisoners Dilemma.
Of course, the main problem was that the execs and the stock market overestimated the potential profits.
Still, I agree with you that the governments screwed up the privatisation. I would have liked to see them privatise the telcos but hold on to the infrastructure, instead of giving over the infrastructure to the newly-privatised telco. After all, what's the use in replacing a government monopoly with a private one?
MartRe: license auctions (Score:2, Insightful)
Having this belief, they chose to believe optimistic profit forecasts rather than drop out of the auctions and go bankrupt.
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:4, Insightful)
The populations in Scandanavian countries are largely centralized into a few densely populated areas.
The USA has 278,058,881 people and 69.209 million mobile phones in 9,158,960 sq km, giving 0.25 phones/person and 7.56 phones/sq km. Finland has 5,175,783 people and 2,162,574 mobile phones in 305,470 sq km, giving 0.42 phones/person and 7.08 phones/sq km. So it would appear that you are correct, and the USA has 30.06 people/sq km and Finland has 16.94 people/sq km.
But you cannot really compare Finland to the USA, it would be more accurate to compare Finland with Alaska and the EU with the USA.
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:3, Interesting)
If this is the case, what incentive does the rest of the world have to take up your standard? Their cute little GSM phones will work fine for them. If you're right, though, GSM won't take off in the US, so your standard will at least prevail on your own turf.
I wouldn't count on it, though. I'm Australian. You think the US is sparsely populated? Australia has a population similar to that of New York, only it's spread over a continent. And we're pretty happy with GSM: most Aussies I know who've been to the US were unimpressed with the mobile phone system there.
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:2)
But we have to remember how fast the tech idustry moves, especially when it comes to cell phones. Now it is no question at all that American companies are pathetically lagging behind in this area (especially when my new nextel phone advertises WAP browsing, 2way text messaging, and java apps as "new"(to you) technology) But I don't think it unlikely that good ol' American business can't take charge.
I agree on your last comment though - protectionism would help American companies initially but hurt them in the longrun. Just like breaking up Microsoft would help the tech industry initially, but in the long-run be bad for everyone.
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:2, Insightful)
It's my impression that Wi-Fi and cellphone technologies are quite orthogonal: how would you do for example Wi-Fi in a car at 150km/h or in a boat 20 km from the coast, or from your smaller-than-palm device? ANd what would be the use?
GSM won for 1 reason: it's the standard: across countries in 4 out of 5 continents, across all but 10% of companies, across almost all cellphone makers. It's over, CDMA, sorry. Until one can have 1 single phone with CDMA working in 5 continents, it won't win.
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:3, Insightful)
First, I see this as being a basically useless criteria for selecting a phone. My CDMA phone works anywhere in the US, and that's generally good enough. Europeans forget the the US is basically comparable with the EU, and not a single country, at least where things like size and travel are concerned.
Second, this isn't a competition between GSM and CDMA, it's between WCDMA and CDMA2000. CDMA2000 works, WCDMA doesn't. Just ask the companies that want to switch the standard.
Den Beste's problem is with the European tendency to pick a winner (even if it's a loser), as compared to the American way of allowing competition to pick.
CDMA is decidedly not USA-only (Score:3, Insightful)
CDMA is actually deployed fully in the USA, Canada, South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia and Japan--that I know of. It's probably in many other countries too. I talked to the rep from my local CDMA company (Bell Mobility [bellmobility.ca]--the other CDMA company up here in Canada is Telus [telusmobility.com]) and he rattled off a nice long list of countries that they have CDMA roaming agreements with.
The biggest problem with CDMA, though, is that the handsets aren't as consumer-friendly as the GSM handsets. If CDMA handsets had an equivalent of the GSM SIM chip, they'd eat GSM alive. I think that's a large part of why GSM is still kicking here--the phones are so much more hackable than the CDMA phones.
Me, I'm hedging my bets; I have a GSM handset and a CDMA handset. GSM because there's more choice available, and CDMA because it's techically superior, and it still works in analogue-only areas. If anything half as cool as KDDI's AU [kddi.com] handsets turns up over here, my primary handset will be CDMA again.
Re:CDMA is decidedly not USA-only (Score:2)
It's not a handset issue but an infrastructure issue. CDMA networks in general don't offer sufficient call management and accounting functionality to implement that sort of thing. It's understandable given that CDMA was developed in the US where at the time cooperation between the carriers (beyond roaming agreements) was the furthest thing from their mind. US carriers use "proprietary" handsets as yet another means of locking you in--if they provided SIM technology, why, you might simply move on to another carrier with their free/cheap phone.
The Minnow HAS won. (Score:4, Insightful)
So CDMA has won. There may be multiple CDMA standards (Although it seems like things are converging for true 3G), but all of the next-gen standards will be CDMA in some form.
Re:The Minnow HAS won. (Score:2)
Yeah, except UMTS has yet to win. So far it's a fiasco. And even if it does win, that still means brownie points for GSM, not CDMA (a.k.a. Qualcom), since it would have shown adaptability instead of stubborn adherence to its own ideas.
Re:Minnow says "Hey we will win" (Score:4, Informative)
"Biased" is another word. Or maybe "rant".
On the RF-level, he raves about the advantages of CDMA over TDMA, without mentioning any deficiencies of CDMA.
Granted CDMA has a higher capacity.
But he fails to mention breathing cells.
Criticising Ericsson with the words:
and later stating
Sounds like phase 1 of NIH.
Having a look at UMTS World [umtsworld.com] and a look at the news on the frontpage (emphasis mine):
Later, he is admitting it is possible on the mobile, but not feaseable. (NIH Phase 2). But impracticable on the infrastructure. You have to install a new one.
Partially, correct. There have to be installed new Base Tranciever Stations. But hardly a new complete infrastructure. The whole GSM "back-end" is compatible.
In what way is that more inpracticable than installing a new "back-end" for the higher level functions? Which he says, can easily added to CDMA2k.
Lastly, which users are looking at the baseband-specification, when buying a mobile?
The reason for the advantage of Japan and Europe is at a higher level. Availability and acceptance of services. Ease of use.
Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a shame, though, that European companies are all license-bound to implement W-CDMA2000, rather than the plain-Jane CDMA.
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
I've said this before and will say it again: the EU 3G licenses have caused Europe to lose its lead in mobile telephony, and will provoke the bankruptcy of much of the sector in Europe. The company to watch is Qualcomm, since they have the only actual functioning 3G technology.
Emacs or Vi? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the real point for me, I can take my Motorola Timeport to pretty much any country I want to go and use it. I can't do that with my old and bulky Qualcomm phone.
The article has a lot of good technical info but about mid way through I started to think 'I have heard this before', it really does have the flavor of the emacs/vi discussion. The basic thrust of the Qualcomm position is that it has a better upgrade path, so even if it is not as good today it will be better in the future.
The guy makes a self contradicting argument, first he says that CDMA is better, then he admits that to make it really work you have to know stuff that is not in the patents. Now I work at the level of the 'front room' guys that he was dissing and I can tell you that they could not give a rats arse as to which system is better in an engineering sense
The Qualcom engineer fully validates the point that Erickson and Nokia were making, as handset manufacturers they were disadvantaged by Qualcom's control of the CDMA technology. There is not a CTO arround who is going to allow a competitor to get that type of a stranglehold without a fight, well not a good one anyway. What the article does not mention is that Erickson only bought the CDMA license after Qualcomm had quit manufacturing - i.e. after they ceased to be a competitor.
From a consumer's point of view there is no question that the European market looks much better than the US. Cellular rates are a half or a quarter of the US prices. I could actually afford to use my pocket PC to surf the Web in Europe, in the US it would be cheaper to have my secretary print out all my email every day and fed-ex it to me.
As for the 'protectionism' jibe, don't fool yourself, the US market is just as protectionist as the EU. In some ways it is worse - wanna buy a large screen TV, well the FCC is going to require you to buy a $200 HDTV tuner with it even though you get your signal off satelite or cable. At least in the EU its the airwaves they auction, not the legislation.
As for 3G, the reason it is failing is very simple and obvious to anyone who visits Europe, they already have a cellular system that works fine and is very cheap to use. Mobile data is a far less compelling proposition than the people selling it claimed. OK it is kewl to be able to read email on the go, but only if doing so is almost no cost. That simply cannot be the case if support for data requires a whole new infrastructure to be rolled out.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Overtake Japan? (Score:3, Informative)
It's the Sony Ericsson T68i [sonyericsson.com] and it'll work very happily on VoiceStream, because it's a tri-band GSM phone. Aside from the camera, it also has BlueTooth, POP3, and some elite easter eggs
Re:Overtake Japan? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Overtake Japan? (Score:2)
Now that they introduced iMode in Europe (my company wrote a little iMode-Application [epublica.de] in Germany), the phone company E+ told us developers that Karaoke on iMode is "big" in Japan.
Now really, do Japanese folks actually sing Karaoke in subways and in pedestrial areas, walking while watching their cell phone's display? How does Karaoke on cell phone look like in actual use?
Re:Overtake Japan? (Score:2)
The have cell phones there with built-in cameras that you can use to see the other person you're talking to (assuming their phone supports it) or even take pictures and e-mail them.
Its called MMS, we have that in Europe now...
Al.Re:Overtake Japan? (Score:2)
No, MMS is used for still pictures. The Japanese phones are already able to send moving images, aka as picturephones.
Re:Overtake Japan? (Score:2)
When I was in Japan a couple months ago I was reading an article in Nikkei Shinbun about the cell phone market in Japan. Here's a statistic to open your eyes: one out of every 2 people in Japan (including infants, elderly, EVERYONE) has a cell phone. The cell phone market in Japan is so deeply saturated the only way to generate growth is to provide new technologies and services to entice users to either switch (if they are using another provider) or add more services (like playing subscription games on your phone).
because of land-line cost (Re:Overtake Japan?) (Score:2)
I have a friend who recently went to Japan. Things may be different because she's a foreigner, but she found it much more convenient to get a cellphone.
Of course, cell plans in North America have gotten nicer, with "unlimited minutes" plans for certain times,etc.
I'd be using only a cellphone myself, except the bastard telephone company requires that you have a land-line to get ADSL, and I hate the local cable service.
Of course, technology has its problems. I seem to remember hearing some issues about Japanese kids, phones with web-browsers, and porn in public places.
A crowded subway and many people with the same ringtone, oh the fun - phorm
Slashdotted, of course. Here's a mirror. (Score:5, Informative)
And right now I'm basking in the evil glow of a major case of schadenfreude.
The original cell phones were analog, using fairly straightforward FM for voice communication. When your phone was in a call, it was granted a frequency by the cell and used it exclusively for the entire duration of the call. FM encoding is extremely inefficient in use of bandwidth, and spectrum was scarce and expensive, and it rapidly became clear that FM wasn't able to handle the traffic which was expected and which was really needed to make cellular telephony a profitable business. One obvious approach was to use digital communications, and to take advantage of advances in microprocessor and digital IC technology to compress the voice traffic going both directions, and thus you saw deployment of the first Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) digital systems. What they do is to take a single channel and timeshare it among several phones, who digitize and compress their voice traffic and transceive it during their timeslice. With IS-136, a 30 KHz channel which had carried only one voice call with AMPS could now carry three digitized calls.
GSM went further than that, and abandoned the old channel size entirely. It allocated 200 KHz channels and divided them into 8 slices, giving each phone somewhat less than 25 KHz effective bandwidth. (There are some losses due to time guardbands and protocol overhead.)
GSM also included a very powerful set of features above that, and included some interesting features not directly associated with the RF link, such as a personality module which contained a customer's phone number and billing information that could be moved to another phone any time the customer wished to. (That particular featured turned out to be a decidedly mixed blessing. While that ability was very convenient for legitimate customers, it was also a magnet for thieves and frauds.)
GSM was clearly superior to IS-136 or such abortions as IDEN (a Motorola design which never became an industry standard because Moto was never willing to license it, which meant that systems which adopted it could only get infrastructure and handsets from Motorola).
In Europe, various governments decided that they (the Europeans) had designed the ultimate digital cellular system, and they passed laws making it illegal to deploy anything except GSM, whose primary supporters/suppliers were Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens and Alcatel.
Meanwhile, the FCC decided that it would not mandate any industry standard. It granted licenses for spectrum but permitted the licensee to choose whatever equipment and standard it wanted. (Within limits. There were certain certification standards required by the FCC to guarantee safety and to avoid interference between neighboring systems.)
And all through the 90's, me and everyone else in the US cell phone industry put up with constant ragging from Europeans about the evident virtues of GSM and the equally evident virtues of a government mandated standard. While in the US you had what seemed at the time to be utter chaos, with a huge number of small companies using a bewildering array of different standards, in Europe anyone could carry their phone almost anywhere in the continent, and if they couldn't use it they could move their personality module into a local phone and use that.
Of course, that apparent chaos in the US was only a temporary phenomenon, and I think maybe the FCC and the rest of the government knew it would be. There's always shakeout, but in the meantime this kind of government policy of keeping hands off meant that the industry was given broad ability to experiment. And within that environment, early in the 1990's, the founders of my former employer Qualcomm began to work on a radically different way to handle cell phones called Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA. It's radical in many, many ways but by far the most obvious is that all the phones in the system and all the cells in the system operate simultaneously on the same carrier frequency. They don't "take turns" because they don't need to.
In the computer industry we talk about the "ISO seven layer model", where the process of communication is modularized and each layer uses the one below it without worrying how the lower layer actually works. TCP works whether the physical layer is 802.11b or ethernet or something else entirely, and TCP itself doesn't change based on that. TCP uses IP, and IP uses the datalink layer, and the problems of the physical layer are dealt with by the datalink layer. But if the physical layer is a 56 KBaud modem, then there are things which won't be possible, which might be possible with 100 megabit ethernet. No amount of work at higher levels can compensate for the fundamental superiority of ethernet over a telephone modem.
Cell phone protocols do the same kind of thing. There's an RF layer and protocols above that, some of which can be very high level and quite abstract, such as the one which controls sending of text messages. However, the change from analog to TDMA was a change at the RF layer. CDMA was yet another approach to the RF layer, which was radically different again. (IS-95 is a specification for a complete protocol stack which includes CDMA as its RF layer.)
In fact, CDMA was so revolutionary that when it was first discussed, many thought it couldn't be made to work. Indeed, at least one European company deeply involved with GSM, Ericsson, went through the three classic stages of Not Invented Here syndrome:
1. It's impossible.
2. It's infeasible.
3. Actually, we thought of it first.
When I worked for Qualcomm, I had to soft pedal this. Now I'm no longer associated with the company, and I can vent about those idiots. At first, the most vocal top brains at Ericsson tried to claim that CDMA violated information theory.
In IS-95 CDMA, a single carrier frequency has a bandwidth of 1.2288 MHz, and up to 40 cell phones in a given sector can all be transmitting chips at that rate on the same carrier frequency, which seemed on first examination to assume that it was possible to send fifty million bits through a one-and-a-quarter MHz band, which would indeed violate Shannon. The mistake they made was that chips aren't "information" based on Shannon's definition, and though those phones were sending chips that fast, they were actually sending bits (real data) at no more than 14,400 bits per second each. (I'll try not to get too bogged down in technical details here, but to some extent it's unavoidable.)
Unfortunately, Qualcomm did a field test in New York City where several prototype phones mounted in vans were able to operate at once on the same frequency talking to multiple cells all of which also operated on the same frequency.
The next argument was that though it seemed technically possible, it would be too expensive. Everyone knew that the electronics required to make CDMA work was a lot more complicated than what TDMA used, and Ericsson's loud voices claimed that it could never be reduced in price enough to make it competitive. And shortly thereafter Qualcomm proved that wrong, too, by beginning to produce both infrastructure and phones at very competitive prices. (Qualcomm did this to bootstrap the industry. It's no longer in either business.)
After which Ericsson suddenly decided that it had applicable patents and took Qualcomm to court. Over the long drawn out process of litigation, every single preliminary court judgment went in favor of Qualcomm, and it became obvious that Ericsson didn't have a case and that Qualcomm wasn't going to be intimidated. Ultimately, the entire case was settled in a massive omnibus agreement where Ericsson became the last of the large companies in the industry to license Qualcomm's patents (on the same royalty terms as everyone else) while taking a large money-losing division off Qualcomm's hands and assuming all the liabilities associated with it, and granting Qualcomm a full license for GSM technology. The industry consensus was that this represented a fullscale surrender by Ericsson.
Nokia wasn't anything like as foolish and had licensed several years before. (Just in passing, the fools at Ericsson are in the front office. Their engineers are as good as anyone else's.)
Still, in the years of apparent chaos in the US, when loud voices in Europe proclaimed the clear advantage of a single continental standard, order began to appear out of the chaos here. Small companies using the same standards set up roaming agreements, and then started merging into larger companies, which merged into yet larger ones. One company (Sprint) started from scratch to build nationwide coverage. Bell Atlantic Mobile acquired GTE Mobile (who had been a joint partner in PrimeCo), and eventually merged with Airtouch to form Verizon, all of which was based on IS-95 CDMA, mostly on 800 MHz. Sprint eventually implemented a reasonable nationwide system also based on CDMA. The last major nationwide system to form was Cingular, after the various GSM carriers in the US realized they were in big trouble competing against Verizon and Sprint and AT&T (which uses IS-136).
Once the existence and commercial feasibility of CDMA were established beyond doubt, other aspects of it began to become clear. At the RF layer, CDMA was obviously drastically superior to any kind of TDMA. For one thing, in any cellular system which had three or more cells, CDMA could carry far more traffic within a given allocation of spectrum than any form of TDMA. (Depending on the physical circumstances, it's usually three times as much but it can be as much as five times.) For another, CDMA was designed from the very beginning to dynamically allocate spectrum.
In TDMA, a given phone in a given voice call is allocated a certain fixed amount of bandwidth whether it needs it or not. In IS-136 that's a bit less than 10 KHz, in GSM it's somewhat less than 25 KHz. (Going each direction; the total is twice that.) But humans don't use bandwidth that way; when you're talking, I'm mostly listening. So your 25 KHz channel to me is carrying your voice, and my 25 KHz channel to you is carrying the sound of me listening to you silently.
In CDMA, the amount of bandwidth that a given phone uses changes 50 times per second, and can vary over a scale of 8:1. When I'm silent, I'm only use 1/8th of the peak bandwidth I use when I'm talking. (But I don't actually send full rate most of the time even when I'm speaking.) That's very useful for voice but it's essential for data which tends to be extremely bursty, and CDMA was born able to do this. It's always had that capability. It's also always had the ability for different phones to be given different overall allocations of bandwidth, because the initial standard included both 8K and 13K codecs (which respectively use 9600 baud and 14,400 baud). So when higher data rates were desired, it was possible to augment the cell and create new cell phones which could transmit 56 kilobits per second using the same frequency as existing handsets.
When GSM wanted to do that (send data at a rate faster than the existing voice channel supported), they ended up having to allocate an entirely new carrier just for that job, which handled nothing except data, and to deploy entirely new infrastructure for it. The resulting system is called GPRS, and in many ways it turned out to be very unsatisfactory for the operating companies because it's really expensive to deploy and because it cuts down on the bandwidth they have available for voice. A given chunk of spectrum must be permanently assigned to one or the other; it can't be reallocated dynamically. Data and voice in CDMA, on the other hand, both use the same carrier and bandwidth is reallocated between the two 50 times per second automatically, and you can implement high speed data without having to install new transmitters in all the cells.
With the push to greater and greater data rates, everyone recognized that a new generation of cellular equipment would be needed, the legendary 3G.
And for the reasons given above, and several others, it was equally clear that it had to use a CDMA air interface. GSM was the very best propeller-driven fighter money could buy, but CDMA was a jet engine, and ultimately TDMA could not compete. The fundamental weakness of TDMA at the RF layer could not be compensated for at any layer higher than that, no matter how well designed it was. GSM/TDMA was a dead end, and to create 3G, Europe's electronics companies were going to have to swallow their pride and admit that Qualcomm had been right all along.
This article in the Economist says that it's not going well. When Qualcomm and its partners designed a new 3G system with new capabilities, they were able to make it backward compatible with IS-95. The new standard is called CDMA 2000, and a CDMA2K handset can work with IS-95 infrastructure, and an IS-95 handset can work with CDMA2K infrastructure, and CDMA2K cells can sit next to IS-95 cells and use the same frequencies. Thus existing operating companies using IS-95 can upgrade incrementally replacing individual cells as budget allows and selling new handsets without having to wholesale replace all existing ones at once. Most important of all, it means that you can take an existing system using an existing spectrum license, and phase it over without acquiring any new spectrum.
None of that is true for GSM. CDMA and TDMA are fundamentally incompatible and there's no way to create a new system (which they're calling WCDMA) which can support existing TDMA handsets. It's technically impossible for the new standard to be backward compatible. Worse is that there's no easy way to phase existing spectrum over. In practice, when WCDMA appears, existing GSM systems will have to install it all, issue new handsets to all customers, and then one day throw a switch -- or else they'll have to license new spectrum for WCDMA while continuing to run GSM on the existing spectrum for legacy customers. It's all going to be very ugly when it happens. (Note: It is possible to design new WCDMA handsets so that they are capable of working with old GSM/TDMA infrastructure, but it adds substantially to the cost of the unit. It is not possible at all to make WCDMA infrastructure work with GSM/TDMA handsets.)
If it happens, for the other thing they're discovering over across the pond is that making CDMA work is a lot harder than they thought it was. They're having technical problems. This article talks about the experience that DoVoMo had in Japan when it deployed the first WCDMA system in the world. It doesn't mention that DoCoMo has had to recall and replace thousands of handsets at its own expense when it was discovered that the handsets had fatal technical problems which could not be fixed. (In fact, DoCoMo had to do this twice. Both times were fantastically expensive, and both times represented really bad public relations fiascos. DoCoMo's name is mud in Japan now; they may never fully recover.)
CDMA2K, on the other hand, is real and it works now. Commercial shipments of infrastructure and handsets began a long time ago. Both Sprint and Verizon began their conversion process more than a year ago, and it's been deployed elsewhere in the world (such a by DoCoMo's rival KDDI) and what everyone is discovering is that it works. The transition is clean. There haven't been any unfortunate surprises.
And it works pretty damned well. (In Japan, half the handsets have cameras in them and their users send each other pictures.)
On the other hand, in Europe the service providers are in deep trouble. They spent truly vast amounts of money on licenses for new spectrum which they can't actually use yet. The licenses specify that they can only be used for WCDMA, and none of the equipment suppliers are actually ready for deployment. Some of the operating companies are talking about giving the licenses back.
And others are beginning to ask if they can have permission to deploy CDMA2K instead, but the bureaucrats in the EU aren't having any of it. Yet.
I confess to a deep feeling of satisfaction about this on a personal level, primarily because of all the horseshit I put up with from GSM fans over the years when they talked about how superior the European approach to this was.
The thing is that if the US had followed the same policy, CDMA would never have been given the chance to prove itself. We now have just as good of nationwide systems and just as much portability as the Europeans do, only our system is fundamentally better. GSM has many features which are marvelous, but they can eventually be grafted onto IS-95 and CDMA2K, because they're all implemented at high protocol levels or don't have anything to do with the RF link. IS-95 and CDMA2K have many cool features, too, but it isn't possible to implement them on a TDMA air interface, so the only way that GSM can have those features is to toss TDMA and switch, which is what they're now trying to do.
So I'm sitting here basking in the warm glow of schadenfreude because nemesis has caught up with European hubris in the cell phone industry.
But there's more to this, because in the microscopic this turns out to be a morality tale which more broadly shows the difference in approaches to most things between the Europeans and the Americans, and I think demonstrates quite clearly why our way is more successful.
Though the adoption of a continent-wide standard for Europe in the 1990's did have certain benefits, it also had some hidden prices. It gave them compatibility, but it was also protectionism, and as is always the case with industries shielded by protectionism, the European cell phone companies became arrogant and complacent, and as a result they fell badly behind. Now they're trying to catch up, and it isn't turning out to be easy. They licensed Qualcomm's patents, but what they're now discovering is that Qualcomm didn't patent everything it knows about making CDMA work, and that it's a really difficult problem. (Damned straight it is. We know a hell of a lot we're not telling. It's pretty straightforward to make it work badly and unreliably, using a lot of battery power. Making it work well on low power is damned tough, and that knowledge is not for sale.)
Part of their problem is that they're trying to run before they've learned to walk. Qualcomm and its partners are moving to CDMA2K after many years of working with IS-95, but the GSM coalition is jumping straight into WCDMA cold.
Like all protected industries, the GSM companies didn't make the investment they should have early enough. Part of why they're way behind is that they started late, and much of that was because of ego, because they didn't want to admit that Qualcomm had been right (or to pay Qualcomm royalties). So they lost two full years in lawsuits and negotiations with Qualcomm before the real design process could begin. And then they discovered that the problem was harder than it looked. As it now stands, it's going to be an interesting question to see whether they can ever get it to work (especially to get interoperability), and more importantly, even if they do to see whether they will be too late and will have missed the market window. I think they will make it work, but I think it will be too late.
Here are some of the lessons I see in this.
First, Europe pulled this decision up to as high a level as it could. When the legal mandate to use GSM was passed, the EU didn't yet exist. Individual nations each passed such laws based on a consensus. In the US, that decision was pushed down as far as possible, and the superiority of CDMA over any TDMA-based system was decided by millions of cell phone users who voted with their wallets.
Second, Europe tried to stop the clock. It decided that it had the final answer with GSM and that no further experimentation was necessary because no further improvement was possible. In the US, the government kept its hands off, and in fact if another newer system comes along which is superior to CDMA, it will have the same opportunity commercially that CDMA had. (Not quite; the market has evolved and we're into the "standardization and shakeout" phase now. But there won't be any government mandate preventing it.)
Europe emphasized cooperation over competition, consensus and agreement over "let's try it and see what happens". It was viewed as important that there be compatibility over the whole continent, and to achieve that they outlawed competition. In the US, we valued competition, and ironically we not only ended up with compatibility over the whole continent but got that compatibility with a superior system which emerged out of competition.
Despite claims to the contrary, Europe passed those laws in part precisely because the standard which was being protected was European and most of the equipment which would be used was homegrown. Part of why those laws were passed was to lock out the US. (Some American companies made GSM equipment, but they never had much market share in Europe.) In the US, everyone was free to compete, and for quite a while the largest seller of handsets here was Nokia. GSM was deployed here and attempted to compete against CDMA on a level playing field, and got handed its ass.
GSM fans will point out that GSM is more broadly deployed elsewhere in the world than IS-95. They'll be careful not to point out the extent to which bribery played a role in that. (Things like "If you choose GSM over CDMA, we'll build a factory there" which is how GSM mostly won in Brazil.)
But that kind of thing is ultimately self-defeating, and TDMA/GSM isn't going to be competitive against CDMA2K, and the Europeans can't make WCDMA work reliably. And as a result of that, a lot of the cellular telecom companies in Europe are in deep financial trouble, not to mention facing legal deadlines for deployment of 3G which cannot possibly be met. MobilCom in Germany is near death, for example, and just announced that it would lay off 40% of its staff. Apparently it would already be dead were it not for a 400 million loan from the German government, which has angered the EU. And because the telecom companies in Europe are all so heavily cross invested, this is a cascading problem. Part of why Mobilcom is in trouble is because France Telecom SA is in trouble and had to renege on an investment commitment. You're eventually going to see a chain-reaction sequence of commercial failures as the money runs out, or more likely you'll see huge government subsidies.
Both these articles say that CDMA2K is "controlled by Qualcomm". That's true and not true. There's an industry standards body, and Qualcomm is probably the most important and influential member of it. It's also true that most of the CDMA2K proposal came out of Qualcomm. But the members of that standards body understand that they're going to get further by cooperation than by competition, and there's very much a "can do" attitude there which helped get a standard approved a long time ago. Qualcomm's proposal wasn't predatory. (By comparison, Sun's Java standards have been predatory, because part of the goal is to keep Sun the largest player in the Java business. Qualcomm is not the largest player in CDMA and probably never will be.) There's also heavy emphasis on interoperability and testing and standards compliance, and there is an independent testing laboratory, which even Qualcomm uses to verify its own products.
Another of the ironies in this is that "cooperative" Europe has turned out not to be cooperating as well as "competitive America". The companies involved in the CDMA2K process are cooperating closely because it's in their own best interest to do so, not because of some sort of fuzzy philosophy of "cooperation and centralization are good things". The companies in the CDMA2K process are cooperating because they know they'll be killed if they don't, not to mention the fact that they smell GSM's blood.
This kind of thing has played out much the same way hundreds of times before between Europe and the US, and nearly always it's had the same result. And as Europe increasingly centralizes and "harmonizes" and moves more and more authority to Brussels, it's going to keep happening. Decisions will be made from the center, and a lot of the time they'll be made wrongly because the "center" is not the infinite repository of all wisdom. The "center" chose GSM/TDMA to be the winner; America decided to let the market figure out the winner, and it didn't turn out to be GSM/TDMA.
European centralization turned out to be a competitive advantage - for the US. And that's going to keep happening. If I was vicious and wanted to wish failure and misery on Europe, I could think of nothing better to inflict it than the process going on now whereby more and more authority will move to Brussels to be used by unelected bureaucrats who answer to no one.
Update 20021006: Michael Jennings offers his perspective. He was involved in the cellular industry in Australia and saw the same GSM arrogance I put up with.
Update: Though the EU didn't exist then, the GSM mandate came from the EC rather than being passed by individual nations.
Re:Slashdotted, of course. Here's a mirror. (Score:4, Informative)
I have to take issue with this, as it's clearly nonsense. Multi-user spread-spectrum radio communications have been in use for over fifty years by the military. The technology is so basic they've been teach the principles to undergraduates for at least ten years.
Anyone who did express that kind of scepticism would surely have been laughed out the door.
Grrr misinformation grr!
Military Radio (Score:2, Interesting)
I did not closely track advances in radio technology after that since I was more interested in software but I can well believe that spread spectrum technology in general and CDMA in particular were considered revolutionary when pioneered. I have seen other reports of CDMA controversy that are consistent with the account given by Steven Den Beste.
Re:Slashdotted, of course. Here's a mirror. (Score:3)
3G is dead folks!!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
This means when they sit down for a coffee they will want access to the Internet. When they sit down in the library they will want wireless. But when people are walking around they only want voice wireless. In other words Internet wireless is a hotspot type technology. You will want it at home, at the airport, on the train, in the office at StarBucks.
3G cannot compete with this since creating hotspot areas are much cheaper and faster. While 3G braggs about 1 MBit, Wifi is already at 11Mbits and moving up.
Sorry folks, 3G is dead! Unless of course 3G is as cheap as Wifi, then 3G will survive. But that would mean somehow somewhere the telcos are going to have to figure out how to make 3G cheap.
Re:3G is dead folks!!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I have 2 *needs* w/r/t a cell phone:
Make and receive voice calls, and send and receive (mostly receive) very short e-mail messages, like CNN Breaking News or a message from the Mac that runs my house, telling me a smoke detector has gone off or an intruder has been detected. A nicety would be built-in BlueTooth, so I can sync the contacts to my Mac's address book. To me, every single other feature on the newfangled phones is useless crap I don't want to pay for. I don't even need a color screen-- does anyone, really, just to read text and numbers? They're stuffing way too much shit into these new phones instead of focusing on making them do fewer things well.
~Philly
Re:3G is dead folks!!!! (Score:2)
Ironic that I answer your reply because the banner ad on this page talks about the Tablet PC with 802.11B building in... www.mira2go.com LOL....
Of course he would say it stems from CDMA. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's like asking a Republican for an interview, and reporting as news that he thinks Republicans will win the Senate in the elections. What else is he going to say?
Re:Of course he would say it stems from CDMA. (Score:2, Insightful)
Userland experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
For the end-user what matters is what works NOW. I have travelled all over Europe, also in China, Malesia, Jamaica and even Cuba without having to loose my lifeline to the rest of the world, switch SIM-cards or handsets or actually do anything out of the ordinary. It works just like it would work at home. But I still cannot use my cellphone at JFK or Newark airport, for example. Call that progress?
Re:Userland experience... (Score:2)
What is CDMA ? (Score:5, Informative)
With TDM -Time Domain Multiplexing-, you let each participant talk in turn. Further, with Statical TDM, each turn is equal in duration, while with Statistical TDL, each turn lasts for as long it is "fair" to.
With FDM -Frequency Domain Multiplexing-, you divide the room in several circles - frequency bands- and each conversation is separated.
With CDMA -Code Division Multiplexing Array-, you let every conversation occur in a different languages. The human brain can filter the other languages out. In practice, every participant has a pair of bitpatterns representing ONE and ZERO. (It would probably work with more patterns per partivipant). ONE and ZERO are just binary opposites IIRC. The bitpatterns of different participants are orthogonal in some way, and add to each other over the medium. That's fine because they are orthogonal anyway and thus remain linearly separable.
To reconstrue the signal I want to hear, I just take the scalar (dot) product of the additive received signal, and the REGISTERED bitpattern of the participant I want to decode. As the other components of the vector are orthogonal to that bitpattern, they get filtered out (definition of scalar product).
In case of /. effect: summary of article (Score:5, Insightful)
The "center" chose GSM/TDMA to be the winner; America decided to let the market figure out the winner, and it didn't turn out to be GSM/TDMA.
Yes, it's just a political statement.
CDMA vs GSM ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most GSM phones use identical simm cards to store configuration data, phone numbers etc...
This means that to switch a simm card from phone A to phone B makes phone B your phone. It allso means that you can comfortably switch phones betwean trusted parties the way we have switched motorviehcles for years now.
I.e. I carry the Panasonic GD35 to field work. I cary the Nokia 6210 to the Office or sales meatings and I use the Panasonic GD92 as my "Dress Phone". (It matches my silver jewelry and Titanium rimed glasses )
Re:CDMA vs GSM ? (Score:2)
I recently visited the US and noticed that T-mobile is advertising there that 'their' mobile phones even work in Europe (small print: only the triple-band version).
But, Quallcomm is always shouting at the world (also in newsgroups) how much better their system is and that the world will eventually convert so this piece isn't too surprising.
Re:CDMA vs GSM ? (Score:3, Funny)
Thanks for making me feel better about myself this morning.
I'm missing just one point (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyhow, for me the article is highly subjective "go america"-babble.
just one thing, i just remembered another article which stated most US-cellphone owners dont/didn't even know about the nice little SMS feature that has become somewhat of a way-of-life for some in europe. So they carry around an extra pager, just because the incompatible cell-networks prevented free exchange of sms-messages though cellphones.
belive what you will, i believe what i want
UMTS = CDMA (Score:4, Informative)
That said, if you read his article, CDMA2000 (The "next generation" after IS-95 CDMA) is Here Now while UMTS equipment isn't here yet in a working form. W-CDMA has proven to be an embarassment for those providers that have rolled it out, and those that haven't are begging to use CDMA2000 instead of W-CDMA, and when the politicians say no, you see the multibillion dollar spectrum writeoffs you've been seeing right and left in Europe.
If UMTS is so much better than CDMA2000, then why have there been so many spectrum writeoffs in Europe, while you don't hear about Verizon or Sprint writing off massive amounts of spectrum?
Overtake? How would that be then? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh yeah? Is that the same open competition that kept the US with three or four different and incompatable air interface technologies while the rest of the world got on with implementing GSM? Yeah, thats worked well for the US in the past, no reason it can't continue to work in the future...
and the use of CDMA
Why? "Plain" CDMA is technically only slightly better than GSM, and then only in certain conditions. Don't even bother trying to claim that the current CDMA technology somehow helps with the upgrade to CDMA2000 or W-CDMA; it doesn't. The current CDMA carriers have to upgrade just as much equipment as the current GSM operators.
Oh, and the European/Rest-Of-World 3G standard is UMTS. So what does CDMA have to do with the price of cell phone technology?
Yeah, like sure (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe I'm misinformed, but I find it hard to believe European phone companies will forget about the billions of euro's they invested in buying share's of the bandwidth for UTMS and say, hell, we'll write that investment off and just go for this CDMA standard. Fat chance.
Read more news (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, like sure (Score:3, Informative)
- It seems to me that Steven Den Beste is comparing Europe's old standard (GSM) with America new-to-be standard CDMA.
He is comparing the currently deployed US standard (CDMA) with the currently deployed European standard (GSM/GPRS). Seems fair to me.- Why doesn't he compare it with UTMS, which is in all probability going to be the new standard in Europe?
First of all, it is called UMTS (Universal Mobile Telephone Service), aka IMT-2000 [imt-2000.org], aka "3G".Secondly, UMTS isn't really available yet. There are no public carriers, nor any consumer phones on the market. For the man on the street, UMTS for all intents and purposes does not exist. It would be an apples-to-oranges comparison.
UMTS is actually a next-generation replacement for both GSM and CDMA. It is really a "family" of standards revolving around a set of evolutionary upgrades to CDMA called W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) and TD-CDMA (Time-Division CDMA, which combines code division and time division). UTMS is designed to be able to offer both modes simultaneously.
UMTS is being rolled out in both Europe and the US, though slowly.
Misunderstood cell phones (Score:5, Interesting)
That, combined with national pride (the US invented CDMA therefore it must the best), has landed the entire US cell phone industry in terrible trouble. There are four competing standards:
CDMA
TDMA
GSM
&
Nextel propreitary Motorola solution (boy, I wonder if the guy who chose that still has a job!)
What does four competing standards mean? It means there can be no meaningful consolidation in the US market, which in turn means that it is very hard to take cost out of the business. That's why the stock prices (and debt prices) for US wireless carriers have been hit so.
The most important things to decide when choosing a 3G technology should be interopability and technical feasibility. Right now, WCDMA (Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens) and CDMA2000 (Qualcomm and Samsung) seem to win in the first and second respectively.
That pride, and an obsession with 'winning' is getting in the way of a single global standard (which would mean MORE competition, not less - and if you don't believe me, look at Europe's mobile phone market) is an absolute disgrace.
Just my 2c's worth.
Robert
(A few irritations with the article: 'the addition of SIM cards made mobile phone theft a growth industry' - hmmm, like there isn't mobile phone theft and cloning in the US under CDMA; and no mention of the fact the CDMA had no support for international roaming. Grrrr. Please, don't get religious about mobile phone standards. Please.)
Financial state of carriers (Score:2)
The flaw in your article is stating that the US providers are hutring a little, while ignoring the fact that European wireless providers are in *serious* financial trouble.
Again, it would help you to read the article...
Re:Financial state of carriers (Score:2)
Fundamentally, almost all European wireless operators are cash positive to some extent.
(That they have a choice of infrastructure vendors to buy from sure helps.)
primed to overtake Japan? (Score:2, Interesting)
They also send each other photos, download maps, download restaurant reviews, and play games. Frankly I'm jealous. I live in Hong Kong so we normally get this sort of thing pretty quickly, but not this.
Sure I can see the U.S. is maybe primed to overtake Europe, there was an article related to this in the Economist last week too (premium content though - can't link to it) but Japan?
Overtake, no. Follow, yes. (Score:2)
In Japan, DoCoMo rolled out W-CDMA and had to issue 2 major handset recalls and in general has had serious problems. Their name is mud thanks to W-CDMA. Their competitor, KDDI, has implemented CDMA2000 and has been extremely successful with it.
Re:primed to overtake Japan? (Score:2)
Actual E-Mail capable cell phones have been on the German and Dutch market for only a few months now, and only by one of the smaller cell phone providers.
Readable summary (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm ?story_id=1353050 [economist.com]
To summarize the summary, Europe's TDMA has the tiny problem of basically being a broken piece of crap, while CDMA2000 actually works. This has been beautifully illustrated in Japan, where Docomo's TDMA network has been a miserable flop, while KDDI's CDMA2000-1X is booming. (Although I'll admit that KDDI's pricing is also a bit more sane.) Couple that with European governments kneecapping their operators with insane 3G license fees, causing immense financial problems right now, and the result is that European telecoms are going to fall off a cliff very soon.
And oh -- contrary to what the Slashdot brief claims, Den Beste's article says nothing about Japan having problems; quite the contrary, KDDI's network is the first successful 3G network on the planet. NTT Docomo is admittedly running into a brick wall, but that's only one operator's problem. The US, while it seems to have gotten the technology right for once (about time!), is still stuck with severe frequency allocation problems, a plethora of incompatible operators and generally a more cellular-hostile culture due to inanities like having to pay for received calls; my 5 is that Japan is the only country that's going to come out a winner from all this.
Cheers,
-j.
Re:Readable summary (Score:3, Informative)
The 3G was auctioned by the gov's, telco's have nobody to blame for those insane prices but themself
Re:Don't forget... (Score:3, Informative)
Ummmm, no. In several countries the licenses were handed out in a "beauty-contest", where the telcos only had to pay nominal fees. As to the countries that auctioned the liceses. They did not dictate the prices. The operators wanted those licenses and they competed between each other, THAT'S what drove the price up. Governments didn't dictate the price, it was settled in a bidding-war. In other words: the price was decided in an auction.
Re:Readable summary (Score:2)
But GSM only is on its way out - mobile networks will transition to dual mode WCDMA and GSM networks providing a much better network than any single CDMA system sould. Come times of emergency there will be 2 networks running - the original GSM and the older WCDMA. The WCDMA airspace will not be clogged by all the voice only traffic - this will stay on GSM where necessary and WCDMA will be available for the data intensive use.
There are lots of benefits - as well as set backs - to having a dual mode network. But only when your dual mode network consists of what are going to be the 2 largest mobile network standards in the world. GSM and WCDMA.
One little correction (Score:3, Informative)
It's still, as you say, horribly broken at the moment.
LOL (Score:2)
I'm all for open competition. As long as my phone continues to work *everywhere*.
All in the story... (Score:3, Funny)
Yep - an excellent summary...
Cheers,
Ian (not anti-US, just anti-daft cheerleading in the face of overwhelming reality)
A Brit asks ... (Score:5, Interesting)
That is, the fact that you pay to receive calls. How on earth did you get there and why do you accept it? Sure, you could argue that you pay for the privilidge of people being able to connect you - but as far as I'm concerned, if someone calls me, they should foot the bill because they are the one that is doing the contacting. It's worked with fixed line long enough, why should it be the other way around.
So, can someone please enlighten me? In the UK we can give our mobile number out to anyone because it'll cost them to call us. If we adopted the US style of billing, I'd be utterly loath to give my number out to anyone who didn't absolutely need it.
I've also got friends who'd phone up and ramble on for hours. If we shifted billing patterns I'd end up saying "listen mate, i know [blah] but this is costing me a bleeding fortune". If they want to talk for hours, let them pay.
Really (and I'm not trolling here) is there any decent benefits to this billing method? The best I can come up with is that it's free to phone your mates and talk for hours because the poor sods foot the bill. But I can't really see any other particular advantages.
Re:A Brit asks ... (Score:2)
I am guessing you heard this about >=5 years ago when roaming charges used to be a killer too.
This is my "what is the reason" question
Re:A Brit asks ... (Score:3, Informative)
It's true that with the bog standard BT package local calls are metered. This is pretty good for people who barely use the phone and hence make very few local calls.
However there are various packages which will give you unmetered dial-up, local and/or national calls:
From their site [bt.com]:
It's not perfect and probably by no means near what the US has, but it's a start. I live in a shared house and my calls come to about £5 a month which means that it's not worth me paying the flat rate as I'd end up losing money.
Mind you, BT have always been renown for dragging their heels when it comes to giving the consumer a better deal ... just look at our broadband prices and subsequent low adoption :o(
Re:A Brit asks ... (Score:2)
A Canadian responds... (Score:2)
We didn't pick the pricing structure, it was merely foisted upon us, and we accepted it because they put fluoride in our water supply.
Seriously, you're right, it's really stupid, but now it's set. It becomes especially problematic for someone like me who uses only a mobile as his primary phone.. and then you get calls from telemarketers...
(Although for the record I can't believe you guys have been paying for metered local landline calls for years - that seems insane to me.)
Now Japan, they've got it sorted. Oh wait...
Re:A Brit asks ... (Score:2)
That is, the fact that you pay to receive calls. How on earth did you get there and why do you accept it? Sure, you could argue that you pay for the privilidge of people being able to connect you - but as far as I'm concerned, if someone calls me, they should foot the bill because they are the one that is doing the contacting. It's worked with fixed line long enough, why should it be the other way around.
I agree - it's a mess. Probably has to do with the large numbers of competing services, each with their own independent billing system. To make calling party pay, you'd have to get all the wireless carriers to agree on billing standards, and to be inter-operable. Then you'd have to have accounting systems in place for wired / wireless carriers to arrange appropriate settlements. Not impossible, since carriers do this with wired lines, but it would require agreeing to standards and some investment on the part of the telecomms. In the current economic environment this is unlikely to happen.
Re:A Brit asks ... (Score:2, Insightful)
It costs the cellcompany the same amount of money! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you made the person calling pay double, what happens when they call a land line phone? Do you have different pricing depending on who you call? If I am Sprint and the person I am calling is AT&T, how does AT&T pay Sprint's bandwidth? What if AT&T's bandwidth costs more than Sprint's and Sprint has to change it's charging depending on which cell phone company you are calling?
What happens in England if a land line person calls a cell phone? Do they have to pay for the cell phone charges?
It just seems easier to bill for the total amount you talk on a cell phone--calling or recieving.
Re:It costs the cellcompany the same amount of mon (Score:3, Informative)
BT generally tends to charge roughly the same sort of price to call each of the mobile networks. This price is higher than the local/national calls. The advantage we have is that all mobile/personal numbers start with 07. So if you give me 07123 456789 I know how much it's going to cost me before I call.
If I am on T-Mobile and I phone Vodafone then it'll cost me about 48 pence per minute (as it's cross network). Vodafone gets nothing as it's the receiving party. If I call my own network then it costs very little.
In the UK, the operators don't charge you for the receiving bandwidth, just the outgoing one. Therefore it is up to them to make it so that their customers call people as much as possible to get their revenue, rather than encouraging other people to call them (it's much easier to incentivise someone to call people on their mobile than it is to say, "hey, get your friends to phone you more!").
Re:A Brit asks ... (Score:4, Informative)
Easy -- it's the whole centralised versus distributed thing again. In sensible countries, the telephone standards body (Oftel, Austel, whoever) mandated a new set of phone numbers specifically for cell phones. For example, in Australia, all mobile phone numbers begin with 04.
In the US, this sort of centralised control would be regarded as unamerican, and as such the work of Satan. Instead, each phone company set up their own numbering system. They all elected to work within the existing US ten-digit numbering scheme (I'd guess because they had to, based on what existing phone switches would handle). So in the US, a landline phone owned by a Las Vegas subscriber might have a number like 1 702 364 1234; but a Las Vegas cell phone subscriber might have a number like 1 702 682 1234.
Now, if I'm calling you on your Las Vegas number, I can tell from looking at the area code (702) whether or not it's going to be a long distance call, and therefore how much I'm going to be billed. But I cannot tell from looking at the number whether I'm calling a landline or a cell phone; and it would therefore be unfair to bill me differently. So the phone company can only reasonably charge me, the caller, the same that they would charge for a regular call. But of course cell phone infrastructure is expensive, so someone's got to pay for it, and the only person left is you, the owner of the cell phone.
Incidentally, when mobile phones first came out in Australia, there were several different payment plans that the subscriber could choose between. One was the American style, and one was the rest-of-the-world style. Guess which one everybody chose.
GSM is technically superior (Score:4, Informative)
Incidentally, as far as I know, only providers that use GSM (in the US, Voicestream/Deutsche Telekom) offer prepaid accounts - like a debit card, you load them up with credit. This has two advantages: 1) You can't run up a huge phone bill, because after you run out of credit no outgoing calls are allowed (with the exception of emergency calls) until you buy more credit, and 2) the mobile company has no information about who you are. Because you buy the SIM card in a brick and mortar store, you can pay for it in cash and the mobile company will never know who you are. Just food for thought.
Bzzt, wrong. (Score:2)
What about Verizon's FreeUP plans? Or Virgin Mobile?
Sprint doesn't seem to do prepaid, they do have a non-contract monthly service though.
Not sure about AT&T or Cingular
GSM, UMTS, WCDMA, etc... (Score:4, Informative)
What does 'Winning' mean (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider: the US (if he's right) may have the best phone system in the world (in a few years)
But: in Europe, people have been actually USING a working phone system for several years.
One thing I found amazing when I moved to Britian a year ago was how cheap the phones were (compared to cost-of-living, anyway) and how much a part of the culture they are now. Heck, you see twelve-year-olds with phones now, never mind teenagers (which ALL have them). Text messaging is commonplace and somewhat reminicent of early (read: poor) email use. The social use of phones is quite astonishing.
The problem is: the US might develop a killer phone system, but only a few rich elites ever use it. This is not useful.
Hell, who CARES how much better the phones get? The networks in densely populated urban areas work just fine with very high use loads, I can make out what people are saying, and I can write short messages. The camera options may turn out to be neat, but I suspect that they won't be used very much. So, why bother to build a next-generation network?
---Nathaniel, non-luddite-but-occassionally-uses-pencil-and-pap
Uncontrolled darwinism is best? Nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
And the US situation won't improve, because what he seems to forget completely is that his lovely state of uncontrolled chaos isn't ended now that his fantastic top of the bill CDMA is available for licensing. Of course CDMA adoption will still be partial, with the next better transmission system (full-spectrum wavelets?) already appearing on the horizon. Technology is always in flux, and if you're always busy implementing the latest thing, you'll never be able to actually *enjoy using something*. Artur C. Clarke has a great story where a war was lost because the generals didn't know 'best' is the enemy of 'better'.
This guy actually has the hubris to say, "we're done. We've developed the last system ever needed in mobile communications. We'll get our first CDMA handset on the market before the Europeans, so that also means our development system works best". Excellent reasoning.
Well, mr. Den Beste, I don't define the best system for mobile communications as the one having the highest capacity or the most fancy features, but as the one that enables most people to communicate while enjoying their freedom to travel from country to country and from vendor to vendor, thank you very much.
CDMA vs GSM (Score:5, Informative)
This is an interesting commentary, but it fails to note many things.
First, the continent-wide adoption of GSM in Europe has led to huge take up of mobile phones. Everyone (schoolkids upwards) has one, communications across networks are not a problem (and are cheap), moving across national boundaries are not a problem (hell - I closed a deal on buying a house (in the UK) over the phone while crossing the border between France and Spain). There are various economic effects going on in Europe which make GSM a winner - the huge take-up, the ease of interconnection, SMS, etc.
That is not to say that GSM does not have problems. There are certainly capacity problems in many European cities - the operators are running out of bandwidth, and this is one of the drivers for the adoption of 3G. Certainly CDMA technology offers much high capacity than GSM. GPRS does offer adequate data rates for must currently conceivable apps, but doesn't do anything for the bandwidth problem. Of course, it's also possible that GSM/GPRS is the way forwards - especially if it will interwork with 802.11 a/b for high speed data in built up areas.
Oh, and did I mention that UMTS and CDMA (IIRC) are both frequency (rather than time) split between the uplink and downlink. This is fine for voice, but when you start running lots of hugely asymetric services (like web browsing), it doen't look so smart.
It is probably a bit disingenuous to claim that the Europeans can't make UMTS work. The system is just going into deployment now. All the major telco manufactureres have systems out on test, and not only are they testing their own kit, they are testing interoperability of parts of the system that are being built from rival vendors kit. So, for example the Radio Access Network might come from the people I work for, but the core comes from someone else. And they are making it work with 5 nines reliability. It will arrive, and soon.
The main problem, and one that is touched on in the article, is actually the huge take-up of GSM. The problem is that everyone who has a 3G phone is quite happy with it. Sure, new things come along all the while (e.g. picture messaging), but no-one has yet come up with a really good reason why you might want to trade in your GSM phone for a 3G one (what do you need up to 2Mb/s for on a phone??).The operators have a good reason for you to switch - they're running out of bandwidth - but that is their problem, not the users.
Probably, what will happen is that the new 3G phones will be dual system GSM/UMTS phones. Pure GSM will gradually be phased out, but will probably always remain in remoter areas where the arguments for 3G just don't stand up economically. The handover between the GSM and UMTS systems is quite nightmareish, but their are a lot of people wrking on it at present.
A big question is the business economics. Nokia are very strong in handsets, and they have a few UMTS contacts. Ericsson have the lion's share of UMTS contracts, but can't get the kit out of the door quick enough. Motorola doesn't have enough contracts, but may be heavyweight enough to survive to the next round, where the quality of competing products may count more. Most of the rest are dead in the water. Alcatel, Lucent, Siemens, Nortel. would you honestly count on any of them being around in a year or so?
Hold on, it's going to be bumpy, but I think UMTS will arrive. CDMA won't disappear, but it won't go global. And the major problem that the US telcos have is their pricing models. There is more to a succesful business than technology - you have to have a product that people want.
regards, treefrog
It's not _just_ the technology, folks (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, IMO CDMA is clearly a superior technology, with better scaling and more convenient data potential. Verizon's (the largest US CDMA player) network is large and pretty much nationwide with minimal gaps in coverage (most of the gaps are supported in AMPS mode, though). Sprint's network size is also pretty good in the metro areas, but without the suburban and rural coverage that Verizon gets. TDMA in the US is dead and moldering - companies can't get away from it fast enough. GSM is a growth area here, replacing "classic" TDMA and being built out new.
Despite my preference for CDMA technically, though, inside my pocket is a Motorola T193. And it's a GSM phone. Why? Not because I travel internationally - I rarely do, and when I do I don't really care about renting a phone (or using mine) and moving the SIM card. And it's not because I like GSM. I don't.
The reason I have a GSM phone is simple: T-Mobile (fr. Voicestream) had the best pricing option for two phones (my wife's and mine), and their coverage was good enough to meet my anticipated usage. Period. No other reasons. I gave up a nice StarTAC 7668 that I'd had with Verizon for the GSM phone - the StarTAC was great but the calling plan sucked.
Ultimately I think whoever wins the cell technology wars in this country will be whoever combines a reasonable per-minute price with caller-pays billing. That's what's generally missing here that many other countries do. If the company that comes out with that uses GSM, then GSM wins. The tech is irrelevant as a marketing decision, it's a behind-the-scenes thing that the consumer doesn't really care about.
Not worth reading, but some here some facts... (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead some facts:
- CDMA is superior to the TDMA/FDMA used by GSM (yes, it's a combination). Big deal. The GSM-standard is a lot older than IS-95.
- A mobile phone net consists of a lot more than just the air interface. One of the advantages of GSM is its close integration with the ISDN fixed network.
- With the exception of one network in Korea (IS-95) and Japan (build their own system), the whole world (or did I miss someone?) decided to go with GSM not IS-95. All because of bribery?
- Everybody agrees, that (W)CDMA is the way to go for 3G (although there were different proposals in the beginning). There's an international standardization body called 3GPP working on the specification (i.e. already finished it). The standard is called UMTS and uses WCDMA.
- Japan decided to use UMTS and take a very important part in its specification, although they don't upgrade from a GSM network.
- The UMTS standard is a new technology without legacy, while CDMA2000 has to make some compromises to be compatible to IS-95.
- Europe doesn't have to 'throw the switch' for UMTS. New spectrum has already been licensed. The old GSM network will work like before for another couple of years at least. Nokia just presented the first combined GSM/UMTS network.
- On the example of MobilCom: Yes, they may very well go bankrupt. Yes, it's probably France Telecom's fault. How this'll impact the German mobile market? Hmm, let's think. Current number of MobilCom network customers: Zero! Nope, don't think it'll be a big deal... (MobilCom was one of the 'fresh starters' for UMTS. They were generally expected to have problems or even go bankrupt)
There's so much more BS in his article, which could be invalidated easily (especially on the 'government dictated' vs. 'free market' part), it's really not worth the read.I have no doubt, that the US will eventually catch up with Europe and Japan, but I nevertheless think that the NIH-syndrom lies clearly on the side of the US. The standardization of UMTS (WCDMA) was an open process done in 3GPP. Several nations took part, like Europe, Japan, Korea, China. However the US operators decided to go with CDMA2000, because it's developed by Qualcomm...
Betmax to overtake VHS (Score:2)
CDMA vs GSM is more or less the same given that GSM is the standard technology in almost every country bar two - www.gsmworld.com has GSM coverage details.
Let me know when we finally win... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me know when we finally win, because right now I feel like the loser.
My brother recently went looking for a cell phone. He lives in a reasonably sized size (Madison, Wisconsin), we have several competing carriers, but service isn't perfect. Getting good coverage at home and at work is naturally essential, so he went shopping around. He inquired about various possibilies of trying a phone to test for dead zones before commiting to a two year contract. Could he just pay for a month and return the phone if dissatisfied? No. Could he take the two year contract and pay for the phone and return both for refund if dissatisfied? No. Was there any way he could try the phone for a few days and return it if dissatisfied, costing him only one or two months service? No. A key element of selecting a provider is the actual coverage you experience. Everyone has dead zones, but only you can determine if the dead zones are acceptable for you. US mobile phone providers are doing their damnest to limit proper competition by making it practically impossible for people to shop around.
Relatedly, I invested in a slightly higher end phone instead of getting the nearly free one that came with my contract. It's a nice phone, but it also represents a doorstop if I chose to change providers. Carriers refuse to support each others phones, sometimes for technical reasons, but mostly because it gives them a chance to sell me a new phone. Not willing to spend the money on the new phone? Phone, meet your owner. Owner, meet your ball and chain. I'm deeply jealous of the easy phone and provider swapping that can be done in Europe.
Meanwhile, as has been pointed out before, we're paying to receive calls. While I do understand that sending a call to my cell phone costs money, sending a call to my land line phone also costs money. The land line phone companies figured out a billing structure so that receiving a call is free. Cell phone service in many foreign countries has figured out how to only charge for making a call, not receiving one. Why isn't this the rule in the U.S. yet?
GSM is a not an encoding method (Score:5, Informative)
WTF is the USS Clueless? (Score:2)
A self.serving pile of bullshit ? (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole article is a self serving pile of bullshit.
This actually _is_ about Qualcomm dominance.
Qualcomm is the RAMBUS Inc. of cellular telephony. Or, to be more precise, they are the role model that RAMBUS tried to imitate, but failed. Qualcomm has successfully poisoned and mined a whole field of technology with their patents and now require everyone to pay "Qualcomm tax" who wants to be active there.
And that doesn't end with patent licenses. As the quoted author put it so well:
Isn't that great ? So Quallcomm sold them licenses with the full knowledge they wouldn't do them any good. Stupid them - why didn't they also buy Qualcomm chips and hire Qualcomm consultants ?
Now I'm asking you to take a step back and remember what the "patent" thing actually is about: Basically, you exchange full disclosure for a time limited monopoly, the idea beeing that this generally furthers innovation.
But in the world of RAMBUS and Qualcomm, Innovation is actually something that has to be prevented. Because, they have already invented something, so anybody else doing so is a threat to them. They are the perfect manifestation of the "Not Invented Here" princciple.
Technology standards exist for a reason. In some fields, lack of standards just brings you chaos and loss of quality. (We've seen that in the US in the past decade). In others, the need for a standard is so extreme, that market participants settle for a vendor standard eventually. This of course, is a huge advantage for the vendor in question, and a huge disadvantage for everyone else.
The author here essentially argues that he thinks the world is now ripe to settle on such a standard. And he is full of glee that its his company winning - after having successfully sabotaged every attempt to agree on a worldwide common standard.
Should we all share his sentiment ?
How about intentional incompatibility (Score:3, Interesting)
IOW, the technical standards aren't enough for a successful system. The carriers also need to realize that their current business practices are retarding the development of good cellular services in the US. In order to reduce churn (people moving from one system to another), they intentionally throw up compatibility problems - such as I described above. They *like* the fact that I have to buy a new phone to use one of their competitors. I currently have contracts with four cellular companies, and every one requires a different phone! This is *not* really a technical issue, as some of those phones operate in 3 different modes!
Then there is the issue of roaming. Does anyone imagine that roaming in the US is anything other than a method to seriously soak the traveler? Of course, if you have the "right" plan, and you roam to your own carriers' network (a couple of exceptions apply), you don't pay the huge roaming charges (often 60-90 cents per minute). If you travel to rural areas (as I do when tornado chasing), this is a huge issue.
The free market in the US did indeed allow the best technology to evolve, and the anti-free market posts in this discussion seem to be ideologically driven rather than fact driven in this regard.
Unfortunately, that market has so far produced an inferior business model where the phones don't operate across multiple systems; where advanced services (such as messaging) likewise are proprietary; where vendors strive for unique (incompatible) services in order to take market share; where there is great waste as each of a number of providers has to provision the same geographical area.
Overall, my take is that the US has used the power of the free market to allow the best technology to be proven, to the advantage of the rest of the world and at great cost to America!
FUD about GSM in Brazil (Score:4, Informative)
Brazil has started deploying GSM networks only this year. Previously, cellular companies used AMPS, which was later migrated to TDMA and CDMA, in different parts of the country. GSM was chosen as a new standard because it was the easiest upgrade path for TDMA, which was the largest installed base.
For the public, GSM phones are selling like hotcakes here for one simple reason: the SIM card (or "personality chip", like it's called in the article) inhibits stealing service over the air. In Brazil, cell phone cloning is a widespread problem, and criminals actively monitor CDMA frequencies to grab handset codes to steal (certain regions are known as a hotbed of cloning, and people are advised to NOT turn on their phone when passing through, as the likelihood of being cloned is very high). This is not possible with GSM, as this depends on a key on the card.
So, GSM is selling now, but it's not the entrenched standard, rather the upstart. And it's selling because it provides something that people in Brazil want, not because of bribery of the government, like the article alludes to.
Disclaimer: I work for a GSM cellullar company in Brazil.
arrrgh (Score:3, Interesting)
WCDMA is the future. Everyone recognizes that technically, UMTS/WCDMA is a much better standard than Qualcomm-patented CDMA2000. And to further bury Qualcomm's last futile attempt to extract royalties from the cellular world, Nokia recently demonstrated a dual-band GSM/WCDMA phone; this phone was able to cross over from a WCDMA network to a GSM one, and continue on the same call, without a blink.
Verizon, the largest company in the US which is controlled by Vodafone, is switching to WCDMA. So is T-Mobile, Cingular, ATTWS, and probably Nextel if they're still around by then. Only Sprint has committed itself to CDMA2000 - and Sprint, at #4, is rapidly becoming as insignificant as Nextel.
The author is right that CDMA-based technologies are better than TDMA. But supporting CMDA2000, doomed from the start, shows him to be nothing more than someone who's really jealous that Europe actually knows what they're doing in regards to cellular, and that they'll have WCDMA networks well before the US. To which I say: too bad.
Re:Den Beste is an American bigot. (Score:3, Informative)
It wasn't actually Schröder making the comparison, but the minister of Justice of his cabinet.
Re:Den Beste is an American bigot. (Score:2, Insightful)
BTW. I don't feel the parent is a troll, please read the article and if you know cell tech you'd know what this dude is saying.
Re:Den Beste is an American bigot. (Score:4, Informative)
AARGH!! This story is getting worse everytime it's being told!
First: It wasn't Schröder who did this, but one of his ministers in a unimportant election speech in some small town!
Second: She didn't compare GWB and Hitler either, but just happened to mention both names within one sentence without any direct comparision!!
I recently was in Taiwan and even there I saw this story on the front page of the newspaper. People, move on. Nothing to see here. The whole thing is not true and has been dramatically overblown by the media!
Sorry for being OT, but this whole story makes me angry...
Re:Den Beste is an American bigot. (Score:2)
So, they don't teach history where you're from?
Re:Den Beste is an American bigot. (Score:3, Insightful)
Folks like Den Beste are the reason there are big problems within American culture with regards to xeno-relations.
I'm sick and tired of Americans being labeled bigots every time they refuse bend over, beg for forgiveness, and admit the rest of the world (mainly Europe) is superior.
Come on, like the countries in Europe don't act snotty about their culture and their accomplishments (see France for example). Try opening a non-French language store in France (not necessarily English either) or a non-Orthodox place of worship in Russia or Greece. In the 80's Japan shoved its economic and technical accomplishments in our faces on a daily basis. Japanese leaders called us lazy. There are plenty of examples of non-US pride.
American culture has problems with xeno-relations? Bullcrap. There is no other place on earth where so many different cultures exist together in relative tolerance. No other place where ideas and customs from different cultures are accepted and blended. Did you know after 9/11 there has been more violence against Jews in France than Muslims in the US? Research it yourself. You want to see xeno-relation problems? Try being a Catholic in Northern Ireland or a Muslim in Serbia.
Look, just because another country or countries criticize us or do things differently doesn't mean they are necessarily right. Remember that every country is looking out for their own interests. America is not perfect and we do thing for our own best interest. But this is a competitive world, lest you forget. Every country is proud of its accomplishments and every country tries to get ahead. Don't be a hypocrite and think the US has to play by some other special rules.
Brian Ellenberger
Re:CDMA phones and the near-far problem (Score:2)
Phones have been able to do that since the analog days, and thus isn't a particularly impressive feature.
Bandwidth utilization is of course very nice, though.
-1 Clueless Troll (Score:3, Informative)
Re:cultural? (Score:2)
Re:Copyright Millenium Digital Act?? (Score:2)
>Good thing this was posted with a +1 bonus, LOL!
Sigh... I'm trying to be constructive here.. we we need a FAQ for the noobs. Here goes:
1) Slashdot is NOT realtime. I repeat Slashdot is NOT realtime.
Still confused? That means when I posted, there were NO posts to "copy" from, or make mine redundant.
2) What +1 bonus??
If your "non-coward" posts are as insulting as this, perhaps that's WHY all your posts default moderate to 1 (or 0)?
For me, using the "+1" would just unnecessarily bring my post to "3".
-Sleepy
Not hiding behind Anonymous. I've pegged my karma anyways which is probably why I can't moderate.