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United States Wireless Networking Technology Hardware

USTR Critical Of Japanese TD-CDMA Licensing 184

Posted by timothy from the complicationism dept.
News for nerds writes "Yahoo Asia reports that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) said in its annual report that the Japanese government has so far refused to issue experimental licenses to certain U.S. companies to test the new TD-CDMA technology. It attacks China and S. Korea along the line. The funny thing is, according to Impress Internet Watch, the Japanese government states that no U.S. companies had actually applied for the license so far. ITmedia also reports the Japanese government didn't deny foreign application, while criticizing the government for too narrow bandwidth of TD-CDMA that can be monopolized easily. Is this the precursor of another wave of pressure onto technology from Japan?"
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USTR Critical Of Japanese TD-CDMA Licensing More

USTR Critical Of Japanese TD-CDMA Licensing

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  • That's it! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Walker2323 ( 670050 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:50AM (#8836087)
    That's it - this means war!

  • new TD-CDMA (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Capt'n Hector ( 650760 )
    Most of these cellphone acronyms go in one ear and out the other, but I thought the "new" thing was GSM. Weren't TDMA and CDMA on their way out?

    • Re:new TD-CDMA (Score:5, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:08AM (#8836127) Homepage
      GSM is rather old. TDMA is going away in the USA. CDMA is going to be around for a while. Most of the new standards are based on new and updated versions of CDMA.

      The standard mentioned in the article is a mix of TDMA and CDMA. It uses CDMA in a half-duplex fashion, with transmission lengths limited to predefined time slots.

      • CDMA is superior (Score:4, Informative)

        by PlatinumInitiate ( 768660 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:26AM (#8836155)
        A lot of GSM folks champion that standard, and it has done well in becoming "the" standard in Europe, Africa and Asia, but technnologically, CDMA is superior technically - for example, it has higher data transfer capacity and has lower radiation levels. It is a pity that such a huge infrastructure based on GSM exists, but I think that a move towards CDMA can only be a good thing.

          • Re:Oh, forgot, here is the link (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Sigurd_Fafnersbane ( 674740 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:13PM (#8839648)

            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.

        • Re:CDMA is superior (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          it has higher data transfer capacity

          Ok. That might be a good point, but is the capacity significantly (50%+) higher?

          has lower radiation levels.

          Completely irrelevant. Cell phone radiation intensity is already miniscule compared to the ambient radiation we receive from space and our surroundings.

          Furthermore, one can show almost with high school physics that even if the intensities were much higher, the radiation from cell phones CANNOT disrupt biological systems.

          Energy is carried by photons. If the

          • Re:CDMA is superior (Score:3, Informative)

            by bronaugh ( 726253 )

            Completely irrelevant. Cell phone radiation intensity is already miniscule compared to the ambient radiation we receive from space and our surroundings.

            I'm quite sure you're incorrect on this point. For all intents and purposes, you can consider a cell phone to be a point source -- intensity of radiation varies with the inverse of the cube of the distance from the source. Background radiation is almost by definition the same everywhere. You're not going to see anywhere near the equivalent of a 200mW micr

          • Re:CDMA is superior (Score:5, Informative)

            by splerdu ( 187709 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @07:25AM (#8836477)
            Ok. That might be a good point, but is the capacity significantly (50%+) higher?

            Not just 50%, but several orders of magnitude higher.

            GSM 56Kbps
            CDMA2000 2Mbps

            how do you think the japanese stream live video on their phones?

            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.
            • > GSM 56Kbps
              > CDMA2000 2Mbps

              Uh, at least compare CDMA2000 to its contemporary, UMTS. Suddenly you're not talking "orders of magnitude" anymore. And they've both got about the same pathetic level of deployment.

            • 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, cov

              • Re:CDMA is superior (Score:5, Informative)

                by Sigurd_Fafnersbane ( 674740 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @11:16AM (#8837707)

                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.

          • > >has lower radiation levels
            > Completely irrelevant.

            Well, I guess that you don't care about battery life, or range (in large cells) or any of those things, then. You do know that phones can put out up to 2 watts, which is a pretty hefty drain on a small battery. It's also very non-trivial to make a 2 watt amplifier that works in the GHz range.

            Attitudes like that will do the same things to phones as have happened to PCs. You'll be able to buy the 4G MeatCooker 3000, capable of outputting 6Kw (nee

          • Completely irrelevant. Cell phone radiation intensity is already miniscule compared to the ambient radiation we receive from space and our surroundings.

            Eh? Do you mean current cellphones, or all cellphones in general? I have used two NEC 21" monitors for the past 5-7 years. Up until the last change in phones (CDMA, GSM, who knows), everytime one of those damned Nokia's rang my monitor would act like it was degaussing. I don't know if that was when they switched from analog to digital or whatever,

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @07:31AM (#8836489)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Only CDMA2000 is based upon CDMA the standard. UMTS is based upon GSM. TD-CDMA is a completely new system and isn't based upon anything. It does use "CDMA the technology", but it certainly isn't related in any way, shape, or form to IS-95.

          You misunderstand. UMTS isn't exactly a radio standard, more a collection of standards that give approximately similar performance. Currently, those are TD-CDMAand W-CDMA. W-CDMA is deployed more or lessd everywhere, because it is simpler to implement, but some countries

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • In UMTS there is FDD and TDD. TDD is what they are referring to in the article. It is Time Division Duplexing of the down and up links. The implementation is much more difficult than FDD (Frequency Division Duplex), but is in the standards to support deployment in Japan and China where bandwidth is already scarce. There will be dedicated TDD bands.
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:new TD-CDMA (Score:2, Funny)

        by Misch ( 158807 )
        CDMA is going to be around for a while.

        The dyslexic among us would rather be rid of the DMCA. Alphabet soup is so fun.

    • Re:new TD-CDMA (Score:5, Informative)

      by alphakappa ( 687189 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:36AM (#8836181) Homepage
      No, CDMA is not on it's way out. CDMA is actually far superior to GSM (IMHO). Actually the commercial implementation of CDMA happened after GSM (CDMA was used by the US military before) which is probaby why most of Asia adopted GSM since that was the cutting-edge technology of that time. Now, both GSM and CDMA (IS-95) are 2G (second generation) technologies. Guess what's 3G? WCDMA (wideband-CDMA) and CDMA-2000. So CDMA is definitely not on its way out.
      • When yozu are looking at the financial only, yes CDMA is superuior. But if you look at the quality only, then , sorry but my experience with CDMA was very poor... This is kind of a give-take. I guess that all considered both system are equivalent (none superior).

      • Re:new TD-CDMA (Score:5, Informative)

        by infiniti99 ( 219973 ) <justin@affinix.com> on Monday April 12, 2004 @06:49AM (#8836418) Homepage
        You are correct. However, it should be said that CMDA vs GSM is an apples and oranges comparison. CDMA is a radio protocol. GSM is a full mobile phone standard of which a radio protocol is just one component. GSM is based on TDMA radio technology, which is outdated by now. The positive point of GSM is that it defines the featureset, including voice (with all the trimmings), data/fax, and sms, as well as concepts like the SIM chip (keeps identity and phone separated), and even the audio codec! This ambitious featureset and level of compatibility is what allowed GSM to dominate most of the world. Of course, like most standards, GSM hasn't really changed in the last 10 years (although lately there have been some add-ons, like GPRS).

        Even so, GSM has withstood the test of time. Some companies in the USA tried to build their own competing systems (using the same radio protocol, TDMA), but they paled in comparison to GSM. Even many CDMA implementations (ie, Sprint, Verizon) have lagged seriously behind GSM's featureset, despite being based on a better radio protocol. Today, CDMA implementations have surpassed GSM capabilities in many areas (wireless data throughput comes to mind), but until I see Verizon using SIM chips, it is safe to say that GSM isn't going anywhere.

        The next generation of mobile technology will simply be improvements to GSM concepts. We'll hopefully continue the trend of network standardization with a solid featureset and a SIM-like identity mechanism, but with an upgraded (CDMA-based) radio protocol.
        • > We'll hopefully continue the trend of network standardization
          > with a solid featureset and a SIM-like identity mechanism,
          > but with an upgraded (CDMA-based) radio protocol.

          UMTS, the completely mismanaged and seriously pre- and overhyped successor to GSM, is based on W-CDMA.

        • Re:new TD-CDMA (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Durrik ( 80651 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @10:24AM (#8837289) Homepage
          CDMA is also a complete radio protocol. I have the misfortune of developing the link layer and control layer for it. This is the software that handles making calls and getting the CDMA phone on the network.

          The CDMA radio interface or physical layer is better then the TDMA layer that GSM uses. From some courses I took, it worked out that CDMA allows for about 5 times the capitity on the same bandwidth that GSM/TDMA allows, that's the practical limitation.

          But the software layer for link and control layers is a MESS, a true and undisguised mess. Now I haven't seen GSM or W-CDMA's link and control layer, but nothing can be as bad as CDMAs link and control layers. This is because there are ten different protocol revisions from JSTD.0008 to IS-2000 Revision C. I don't know how bad GSM->W-CDMA is, but W-CDMA's physical layer is not backwards compatible with GSM so it doesn't have the problem of backwards compatibility that CDMA requires.

          TD-CDMA is a completely different beast of course. I think is the same as TD-SCDMA that China has come up with, which seems to be a mash of CDMA, W-CDMA, SCDMA, and a few others. But it uses the W-CDMA messaging and control with some modifications.

          Alot of the reasons that people use to claim that GSM is better then CDMA is based on it being an older technology, with 10 more years of development behind it. 10 years gives you smaller/cheeper chips which provides cheeper products. It also allows for ten more years of applications and add-on developments. And of course the APIs between CDMA and GSM are different so you can't port that across easily. And 10 years gives you a lot of market penitration.
        • I agree completely.
          About the quality of CDMA services being low - I'd say that it's a problem with the implementation, not the technology as such since I know from experience that CDMA is a brilliant concept that uses spread-spectrum tech (which has some great properties of being immune to a large amount of noise etc - your low power gps receivers also use a similar system).
          Of course, it would be great if implementations of CDMA used SIM cards (or something similar) instead of locking a mobile unit with
      • > Guess what's 3G? WCDMA (wideband-CDMA) and CDMA-2000.
        > So CDMA is definitely not on its way out.

        And guess that's based on W-CDMA? That's right, UMTS, the successor to GSM. Let's compare the latest in both camps, shall we? As someone else said, GSM is much more than a PHY specification, it's an entire cellular architecture. It can grow with the times and adopt the latest technologies for its various components without invalidating the rest of its standards.

        What you have to realize is that when GSM
      • (CDMA was used by the US military before) which is probaby why most of Asia adopted GSM since that was the cutting-edge technology of that time. Now, both GSM and CDMA (IS-95) are 2G (second generation) technologies. Guess what's 3G? WCDMA (wideband-CDMA) and CDMA-2000. So CDMA is definitely not on its way out.

        Be careful with your use of terms, there. The military uses CDMA in the sense that they use spread spectrum with codes defining the channels, but military systems are almost universally frequency-

        • I agree. I didn't mean that the military uses IS-95, just that it uses spread spectrum - it's just simpler to use CDMA as a term to refer to both (though frequency hopping is not direct-sequence like CDMA) to avoid too much complexity in explanations. Of course, I know this is slashdot...

    • Re:new TD-CDMA (Score:2, Insightful)

      by d99-sbr ( 568719 )
      GSM is not a technology in itself, it is a brand name for a certain TDMA design.

      GSM is old. I believe the standard was set in something like 1982. The first networks started appearing around 1990.

      All new systems that I know of use variations on CDMA.

      • Re:new TD-CDMA (Score:2, Interesting)

        by The Conductor ( 758639 )
        GSM is old.

        Everything in radio is old. Spread spectrum was patented in the 40's, FM in the 30's, and the principles of TDMA were worked out by Nyquist and his cohorts in Bell Labs in the 20's. Huffman coded digital data? Introduced (albeit in primitive form) by Samuel Morse. Even the "advanced" modulation formats being proposed these days are pretty much straightforward implementations of coding theories developed by Claude Shannon & his comtemporaries in the 50's

        What's new is cheap silicon to st

    • The "TD" in TD-CDMA refers to the duplexing. That is, time division is used for dividing the uplink from the downlink, but the same frequency band is used for both. One advantage of this is that uplink and downlink can be asymmetric and the percentage of resources devoted to uplink and downlink can be different and (more importantly) adjusted on the fly. This is much better suited to data services than are systems for which the percentages devoted to uplink and dowlink are fixed. (A disadvantage of TDD is t
  • Ok.

    Lawrence Lessig has quite a convincing argument for 'freeing' spectrum- in short (and not giving it the justice it deserves- he says it better in 'The Future of Ideas'), a lack of regulation (both legal and 'structural' regulation- i.e. the internet isn't structurally regulated whereas the phone system is, being centrally regulated) worked absolute wonders for the Internet. If the internet wasn't end-to-end and open, it'd be a shadow of what it is now.

    So, basically, he believes that the spectrum is a medium which could be much like the internet, given protocols and standards that allowed things to connect using it.

    As something somewhat like the internet would be much more useful than something like the phone system in the long run, I think the real news here, rather than there being a US-Japan spectrum spat, is that countries are squabbling over how to miserly regulate the spectrum in the first place.

    RD

    • Re:Lawrence Lessig and spectrum regulation (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Baki ( 72515 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:32AM (#8836174)
      I don't think you can compare spectrum to Internet. The main difference being that I can easily "shield" myself from parts of the Internet, i.e. I can choose where to connect to by linking a cable to A and not to B.

      It is not so easy to shield myself from radiowaves and connect to some other network using some other protocol if I want to. If my neighbour uses protocol X to connect to A, he may block me to connect to B using protocol Y; chances are that me trying and failing, will block him too.

      I.e. the less "directed" nature of a large part of the spectrum does require at least some regulation. I don't say that the current policies are OK, however no regulation at all will lead to chaos, not to speak of health risks for strong fields in some frequencies.

      An intermediate and reasonable form of regulation might be to mandate adherence to certain well behaved protocols, but allow anyone as long as they do not violate the protocols to use the (part of the) spectrium freely.
    • So, basically, he believes that the spectrum is a medium which could be much like the internet, given protocols and standards that allowed things to connect using it.
      The problem with the spectrum is that if you don't state clearly what and where you transmit, it becomes a chaos of interferences. It has to be regulated to be useful.
      Another example is the US-european models of mobile/cell telephony, where the strong european regulation (mandatory GSM) in fact allowed a stronger market; in that example you al
      • But that's what he just said... set protocol standards.. it is exactly like GSM.

        Rather than have the authorities tell us what we can use each band for, tell us what protocol to use, and let us figure out what to use them for.

        Wider, fatter open spectrum... look what has been done so far in 2.4Ghz ISM. and it's a SHITTY piece of spectrum.

        Open up some real specttrum, set teh access standards, but don't tell us what to use it FOR.. and then we'll get somewhere.
        • But that's what he just said... set protocol standards.. it is exactly like GSM.

          No, it's not like GSM. In Europe you can only use GSM, in the bands allocated for GSM. And that was good for the market, everyone knew which game to play, unlike the US where multiple standards "rule".

          Rather than have the authorities tell us what we can use each band for, tell us what protocol to use, and let us figure out what to use them for.
          You can't use every protocol in every band, and the authorities do well saying w
  • could anyone give a heads up for people who dont know what TD-CDMA licensing is? cmon, we all want to be too lazy to RTFA.

  • So what? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:00AM (#8836114) Homepage Journal
    Is America going to be the leader and develop high quality technology that other countries can come begging for, or is it going to sit at Japan's doorstep begging for scraps?

    Japan must feel like how I did in Civ2. I was always so far ahead of the rest of the nations because I focused on developing technology while the rest of the world was more interested in building up their militaries.

    • Re:So what? (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by JPriest ( 547211 )
      That is because Japan understands that there are better things to spend money on than policing a world that does not want to be policed. Our current dilemma with the Shiite Muslims in Iraq is a textbook example of why so many people hate this country. We should be trying to place the Shiite's in control of Iraq, but instead we shut down their newspaper for speaking out and issue an arrest warrant for the most important Shiite in Iraq. The Sadam opposed the Shiite and killed al-Sadr's father. You would think
      • We should be trying to place the Shiite's in control of Iraq...

        So that they can oppress the Sunnis and Kurds, and ally Iraq with Iran? Great plan.

      • You do know that we shut down the newspaper because they were inciting violence don't you? Here in the US a paper would be shut down if it was calling for the violent overthrow of the government and the murder of anybody associated with it.
    • Because they are under the US military protection, they don't need to do much with their military. They can afford to spend elsewhere. Like Canada, they only need a token military.

      • Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Hast ( 24833 )
        It's common that countries that lose a war are forbidden by treaties to build and army for a certain time. I would assume this goes for Japan after WW2 as well.

        So it wasn't really that they depended on a US army to protect them but that they were not allowed to have one. After they had been doing this for a few decades and become one of the leading countries in the process I assmume they discovered that it was quite a lot better to have a lot of research and tech instead of a military so why stop doing it?

  • Have we been here before? (Score:5, Informative)

    by beanfeast ( 125905 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:05AM (#8836121)

    I seem to recall a similar debate [slashdot.org] over the U.S.'s attempt to push the use of CDMA at the expense of of GSM in Iraq.


    The words pot and kettle come to mind

    • Re:Have we been here before? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Biotech9 ( 704202 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:16AM (#8836140) Homepage
      I seem to recall a similar debate over the U.S.'s attempt to push the use of CDMA at the expense of of GSM in Iraq.

      Perhaps, but that was then (when we all imagined a groovy peaceful Iraq starting a domino effect of democratisation across the Arab world), And this is now, when I can't see the mobile phone market in Iraq being very relevant for the next few years.

      This is more akin to how the US has berated china over keeping its currency artifically low against the Dollar [channelnewsasia.com], while doing the same thing to Europe.

      Or the Way the US has slammed the EU's fine against Microsoft as the 'opening shot of a trade war', [delawareonline.com] While ignoring its own illegal subsidies and tariffs which have been in place for years.

      The saying was, 'war is an extension of politics by other means', Today it has an addition of... " And, Politics is an extension of economics by other means".

      • This is more akin to how the US has berated china over keeping its currency artifically low against the Dollar, while doing the same thing to Europe.

        Lol.

        Yes, it's another clever U.S. strategy of creating massive debt, political instability and dodgy markets to drive the dollar down vs. the euro.

        Do you see any fundamental reason to be long dollars right now? No? Then why do you need a conspiracy to explain it?

        • I think in the future GWBush will be remembered as alot of terrible things, one of which will be "the man who made the euro."

          • I think in the future GWBush will be remembered as alot of terrible things, one of which will be "the man who made the euro."

            As if Britain didn't have enough reasons to hate him.

          • Re:Have we been here before? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:59AM (#8836227)
            Actually, US cannot let the dollar to get too weak or the oil exporting countries will switch over to using Euro instead of the US dollar.

            Now that would mean serious problems for the US economy. Serious enough to start a war, in fact.

            • > Serious enough to start a war, in fact.

              You mean ANOTHER one?!
            • Actually, US cannot let the dollar to get too weak or the oil exporting countries will switch over to using Euro instead of the US dollar. .. that would mean serious problems for the US economy

              Why is that, exactly? If the US dollar gained strength after the switch, then the US is fat and happy. Is it the new instability of the price of oil that would screw the US? Or a domino effect of other investors switching to the Euro? Or something else?

              • It's a case of supply and demand. Currently, there is a worldwide demand for US dollars from the reserve each country maintains to buy oil. If oil starts being sold in Euros, they no longer have to keep US dollars; they need Euros instead. A lot of those dollars sitting in foreign reserve vaults around the world would be sold off and return to the US. This would likely cause the US money supply to grow, which in turn would cause inflation.

                The situation could snowball if the dollar loses too much value,

      • Mobile Equipment rules in Iraq! (Score:4, Informative)

        by Slashamatic ( 553801 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @05:43AM (#8836301)
        And this is now, when I can't see the mobile phone market in Iraq being very relevant for the next few years.
        Fwiw, if you don't have a military radio or a satellite telephone, you really want a mobile phone in Iraq. The lack of physical wires means that they tend to be much more reliable *and* it will work in the neighbouring countries. The telephones are, of course, GSM as that is the standard in the arab world.
      • This is more akin to how the US has berated china over keeping its currency artifically low against the Dollar, while doing the same thing to Europe.

        How has the US done this to Europe? China and Japan keep their currencies artificially low by buying up American bonds, thereby driving up the price for dollar denominated assets and lowering the cost of yuan/yen-denominated assets to Americans. America plays no such game on the European asset market.

        Explanation, please.
      • "we all imagined a groovy peaceful Iraq starting a domino effect of democratisation across the Arab world"

        If you believed that Iraq would be groovy, you'll believe that Japan is keeping the US tech sector down with these fake TD-CDMA "obstructions". The only skill BushCo has got is political scams. The sooner they're out of the way, the sooner we can get a manager in office who won't stick his monkey finger into the business of engineers and business developers.
    • And not even just the once you mention, but over and over...

  • IT'S A COMMIE PLOT (Score:3, Funny)

    by Old Wolf ( 56093 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:38AM (#8836183)
    Has anyone noticed that USTR is only 1 place in the alphabet different to USSR ?

  • A little Jargon explaining (Score:5, Informative)

    by alphakappa ( 687189 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:46AM (#8836199) Homepage
    CDMA: Code Division Multiple Access. Here the entire allowed frequency spectrum is used (actually a band) by every user. The idea (in simple terms) is to send out signals that are coded with each user's individual (and unique) code so that only that user can decode it to get meaningful information, everyone else sees that information as noise. You don't need different frequencies in adjacent cells as in traditional cellphone technology (TDMA).

    GSM: Global System for Mobile communications - an advanced technology based on TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access). Here you need different frequencies in adjacent cells. Usually a cluster of cells is used with each cell operating at a different frequency.

    Some more info [rr.com]
    • GSM is about a heck of a lot more than the air interface. There is a lot connected with roaming between networks, the specification and use of the SIM card. The GSM spec could be changed to include CDMA, but this will hang on a lot of things. The first problem is that of patent licensing the second being the availability of mobile equipment that can switch air interfaces. Note that CDMA will be used by GSM Phase 3 equipment, but that hardly exists at the moment.

      It is the fact that GSM stresses interopera

  • They never applied??? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is like complaints from some US car companies that their cars didn't sell well in Japan. But they didn't notice that they drive on the left side of the road in Japan, and they tried to sell regular US models...

  • CDMA vs. GSM (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:55AM (#8836222)
    As I understand it, CDMA costs about 10% of what GSM costs in terms of towers, switches and other related infrastructure. This is a major reason why the US is such a "fan" of CDMA (ignoring for a moment the obvious "MADE IN USA" aspect of US support). That said, the sound quality of CDMA, particularly with respect to transmission delays, is horrible when compared with GSM. Mobile telephones in GSM areas just sound much, much more like land-line telephones than CDMA ones.

    CDMA may be a marvelous technology, but it has the unfortunate liability that the service that it delivers to the customer is ridiculously second-rate when compared with GSM. I have used cell phones in the US, and I must say that they are uniformly awful when compared with the GSM system in Europe, for example.

    • "sound quality of CDMA, particularly with respect to transmission delays, is horrible when compared with GSM"

      really??? I'd like to hear how good GSM sounds, becuase i use my 3G CDMA cell phone here in japan, and it sounds better then any land line i ever heard in america. the sound quality is as though the person is just right there infront of you... i'm not saying you're wrong, i'm just saying that if you're right, then GSM has unimaginable good sound quality :)

      • CDMA in Japan is GSM (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Slashamatic ( 553801 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @05:47AM (#8836309)
        Japan is deploying GMS Phase 3, which just happens to use CDMA as the air-interface, the rest is as per the standard GSM specs.

        Incidentally, in many parts of the world straight TDMA GSM gives better quality than land-lines because of the digital nature of the network.

      • but it's a 3g phone, it's a later version of the cdma standard with more bandwidth per voice call, so that's irrelevent isn't it really.

        3g voice quality is certainly good though, honestly I've never found old style tdma gsm to be noticably bad for plain voice (in the UK that is, can't comment on elsewhere).

    • Re:CDMA vs. GSM (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      CDMA may be a marvelous technology, but it has the unfortunate liability that the service that it delivers to the customer is ridiculously second-rate when compared with GSM. I have used cell phones in the US, and I must say that they are uniformly awful when compared with the GSM system in Europe, for example.

      You are confusing the quality of the technology with the quality of a cellphone company's network. I find European GSM quality much better than US GSM quality.

      CDMA is a better technology than GSM.
      • It seems from other posts that the big confusion is that CDMA is both a phone standard and a radio transmission system.

        CDMA the transmission system is better than that which is used in old GSM systems. However newer GSM systems use CDMA for transmission (this is 3G). CDMA the phone system is inferior to GSM the phone system (less features and lower voice quality).

        Even though I'm actually kind of in the mobile industry I still find all these standards confusing.

        Wikipedia to the rescue, start off at the CD [wikipedia.org]
    • Well, In India we have both CDMA and GSM
      The telephone towers for CDMA seem give around 10 Kms of radius coverage. GSM towers around 2-3.Unless the equipment in the towers are radically different the price ratio you quoted should be correct.
      But there is no difference in sound quality wrt delays or "dropped packets" in GSM vs CDMA (I had a nokia 5510 on GSM which sounded better than the LGRD 2030 phone I have now but that is just the speakers -5510 had an mp3 player) . Plus accessing the net on a GSM ph

  • If there was ever a thread where it would be "ok" to threadjack, this would be it.

  • US = Unbelievably Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Slashamatic ( 553801 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @05:37AM (#8836290)
    Japan leads the world in the use of GSM Phase 3 technology. The funny thing is that GSM phase 3 uses CDMA as the air interface. As I mentioned earlier, the air interface is only a minor part of the GSM spec. A GSM phase 3 handset can still be used in "reverse compatability mode" roaming onto a GSM Phase 2 system.

    What the US is pushing is a CDMA system that doesn't communicate with anything else, which is being pushed by Qualcomm (and their senators). CDMA should provide a much better overall quality and spectrum of possible services, unfortunately in the US it doesn't. This is becase the air spec is just a small part of it.

    The fun thing is that GSM Phase 3 means that some Qualcomm poatents must be licensed so they are still being paid for the technology.

    • NTT may lead the world in WCDMA, but they're having a hell of a time competing with KDDA (the main Japanese 1x CDMA provider). The problem is is that even with a CDMA air protocol, there's dramatically more overhead in GSM.

      In a free, non-controlled market, the only way WCDMA/UMTS can compete is through government-regulation, like, say, banning 1x CDMA providers. There's also a lot to be said for the fact that 3G CDMA like EV-DO and EV-DV have been shown to be faster than UMTS and friends. Combine this with
      • This is a little like saying well, we doon't want to make right-hand drive cars so we demand that part of the road is set aside for cars that drive on the right. Its called compatability.

        Yep, there is much more overhead in GSM because it does more. Qualcomm frankly make me sick because although they developed CDMA for mobile equipment and promoted it aggressively, they forgot that an air-protocol doesn't make a complete system. Implement a fraction of the protocol and everything is faster, but its better

      • "KDDA" should be "KDDI". Interestingly, KDDI beat Docomo to the draw with its 3G service, and it's also the one company in Japan with close ties to Qualcomm. Some parts of KDDI think that's OK, other parts don't. It means they have to pay lip service to BREW, which again is either good if you're a developer in the loop, or bad if you're not.

  • Been somewhere similar before (Score:5, Informative)

    by BillsPetMonkey ( 654200 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @06:51AM (#8836419)
    At a time when the US and Europe were being sold WAP technology, the Japanese developed imode, and gained around 30m users in a couple of short years.

    WAP never sold well, and people were never convinced of it's merits. End of story - it was superceeded by 3G and ahem, 2.5G. Kind of.

    The fact was that imode could never be sold in Europe because the WAP consortium had outlawed packet switching technologies with respective governments' help. Thus the infrastructure was labelled expensive and proprietary (which is exactly what WAP was anyway), and was prevented from being implemented.

    The WAP consortium was formed with the expressed purpose of keeping Japanese technology out of Europe and the US, and so we can see the same thing happening here - the Japanese develop a superior technology, so US and European carriers seek to refuse it entry to the market.

    Worth remembering next time you go into a mobile phone shop and think "Why hasn't the technology here improved much in the last 5 years?" ...
    • I-mode has been available in Germany for two years now from E-plus. It hasn't been that successful here.

      The WAP consortium was only seeking a way to get html down a low-bandwith traditional style connection as that is what is available in most of Europe. GPRS (already deployed) and later UMTS make this redundant.

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