ok, I think I am anyway. haven't made up my mind 100% yet. But if I do get one that is the phone I'm getting!
I'm getting a new cellphone
- Thread starter XzanderX
- Start date
ok, I think I am anyway. haven't made up my mind 100% yet. But if I do get one that is the phone I'm getting!
deadair
Overly-Cryptic Jake
avi
W3RK3R
post your number dude.
my company pays for my cell - I didn't even want one, but they made me get it.
my company pays for my cell - I didn't even want one, but they made me get it.
but if you call I would have to answer, and it would get all awkward, I would freak out, scream SLUT and hang up on you.
xfer
I JERK OFF TO ARCTOPUS
I read an article about cell-phone protocols that made me feel very badly toward Ericsson...they did a lot of political wrangling to try and fuck the cell-phone industry over in their favour and ended up getting left far behind when they lost.
OH MY GOD! are you saying that a BIG company did something shady??? I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S TRUE! My world is coming apart!
xfer
I JERK OFF TO ARCTOPUS
Oh, I'm not saying I blame them and have an ideological opposition to their cellphones--just that when they ultimately FAILED, their company was set back years and hasn't yet caught up. 
I would say that Ericsson as a mobile net producer is world leading, when it comes to phones, they did some really crappy versions in 1997-2000.
I don't agree with them being left behind anymore. they were the first company with color screens, first with GPRS, first with cellphone cameras and they rule the bluetooth field.
I don't agree with them being left behind anymore. they were the first company with color screens, first with GPRS, first with cellphone cameras and they rule the bluetooth field.
The Dope
Hi.
xfer
I JERK OFF TO ARCTOPUS
Well, here's the article I read. I wish I could link this and spare you all the spam, but it's been expired, so I had to pull it from a yahoogroups archive:
Told You So...
By Steven Den Beste 10/21/2002
I used to work for Qualcomm designing cell phones.
Qualcomm is the company that invented the CDMA cell
phone and made it practical and made it into a market
success. It is now the leading system in the American
market.
And right now I'm basking in the evil glow of a major
case of schadenfreude.
But allow me to explain why. And bear with me: this
article has a lot of technical jargon. But it's worth
it if you plow through to understand how flexibility
and ingenuity in a competitive system will trump
planning and central control any time.
Cell Hell
The original cell phones were analog, using fairly
straightforward FM channels for voice communication
(technically, Frequency Division Multiple Access or
FDMA). When your phone was in a call, it was granted
an FM channel by the cell and used it exclusively
until the call ended. FM encoding used spectrum
extremely inefficiently. Spectrum (RF bandwidth
licensed from a governmental authority) was scarce and
expensive, and it rapidly became clear that FM wasn't
able to handle the traffic that was necessary to make
cellular telephony a profitable business through
economy of scale. Though the system as a whole was
known as the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), it
became obvious that it wasn't very advanced..
One obvious approach to this problem was to digitally
encode the voice traffic and compress it. This
approach led to the first Time Division Multiple
Access (TDMA) digital systems, which take a single
channel and timeshare it among several phones. Each
phone digitizes and compresses its voice traffic and
transceives it during its assigned timeslice. In the
first TDMA-based cell phone system deployed in the US
(which was controlled by TIA/EIA standard IS-136), a
30 KHz (times 2) channel which had carried only one
voice call with AMPS could now carry three digitized
calls, making it a nice upgrade.
GSM Gloaters
Meanwhile, a consortium of European companies designed
the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM)
which abandoned the old channel size entirely. They
allocated 200 KHz channels (times 2) and divided them
into 8 slices, giving each phone somewhat less than 25
KHz effective bandwidth (each direction).
"FDMA" and "TDMA" are examples of air interfaces.
"AMPS", "IS-136" and "GSM" are full cellular protocol
stacks, which include specifications for the air
interfaces they use but contain much more besides,
most of which is not directly related to the air
interface. If GSM is a Corvette, TDMA would be the
tires mounted on it. The tires carry the car, and
ultimately do set limits on performance, but the tires
don't have anything to do with the stereo in the car,
or how comfortable the bucket seats are.
GSM was clearly superior to both IS-136 and IDEN (a
Motorola design which Moto refused to license to
anyone else, killing its commercial viability). As one
of its first significant actions, the European
Commission decided that 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 1990's, everyone in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 which were mutually incompatible, in Europe
anyone could carry their phone almost anywhere in the
continent, and if they couldn't use it they could move
their SIMM into a local phone and use that.
U.S. Emerges
Of course, that apparent chaos in the U.S. 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 and consolidation in a developing
market environment. But this government policy of
keeping its hands off meant that industry players were
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 kind of cell phone air interface called Code
Division Multiple Access, or CDMA.
CDMA is a form of Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum
(DSS) and is ultimately based on an idea patented in
the 1940's by Hedy Lamarr. (Who says beauty and brains
don't fit in the same package?) CDMA is radical in
many ways. By far the most obvious radical shift 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. Qualcomm and other companies created a
cellular phone specification based on CDMA, which was
eventually published as IS-95 under the auspices of
the EIA, TIA and JEDEC.
In fact, Qualcomm's CDMA proposal was so revolutionary
that when it was first discussed, many thought it
couldn't be made to work. 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 how I
felt about this. Now I'm no longer associated with the
company, and I can indulge in a rant.
At first, the most vocal top brains at Ericsson tried
to claim that CDMA violated Information Theory, Claude
Shannon's vitally important contribution to nearly
everything in electronics. In the IS-95 implementation
of CDMA, a single carrier frequency has a bandwidth of
1.2288 MHz, each direction, 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 be a case of trying to fit
fifty million bits into a one-and-a-quarter MHz sack,
which would indeed violate Shannon. The mistake they
made was that chips aren't "information" based on
Shannon's definition. Each chip contains only a small
fraction of a bit of true information (which is why
they're called "chips") and though those phones were
sending chips at an immense rate, the actual bit-rate
per second was either 9600 or 14,400 (depending on the
voice compression codec being used).
Unfortunately for Ericsson's claims of physical
impossibility, 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
while communicating with multiple cells all of which
also operated on the same frequency. (And they proved
that soft handoff worked, too, by driving around
during calls.)
OK, Ericsson's voices said, maybe it does work, but
it's going to be too expensive. Everyone knew that the
electronics required to make CDMA work was a lot more
complicated than what TDMA needed, and Ericsson's loud
voices claimed that it could never be reduced in price
enough to make it competitive.
Only problem was that Qualcomm proved that wrong, too,
by beginning to produce both infrastructure and phones
at competitive prices. (Qualcomm did this to bootstrap
the industry. It's no longer in either business.) Both
were more expensive than competing systems, but not
enough to make it commercially uncompetitive, and with
rising volume and increasing experience, as well as
continued advances in the IC industry, the prices are
now pretty close to the same.
At which point Ericsson suddenly decided that it had
applicable patents and took Qualcomm to court. Over
the long drawn out process of litigation, every
important preliminary court judgment went in favor of
Qualcomm, and after most of Ericsson's infringement
claims were summarily dismissed it became obvious that
Ericsson didn't have a case, and equally obvious 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 was a fullscale surrender by Ericsson.
Nokia wasn't as foolish and had licensed several years
before. (Just in passing, the people at Ericsson who
have my contempt are in the front office. Their
engineers are as good as anyone else's.)
Order Out of Chaos
In the years of apparent chaos in the U.S., when loud
voices in Europe proclaimed the clear advantage of a
single continental standard, order began to appear.
Small companies using compatible 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 using the 1900 MHz version of
IS-95 (ANSI J-STD-008, later merged into IS-95). Bell
Atlantic Mobile acquired GTE Mobile (who had been a
joint partner in PrimeCo), and eventually merged with
Airtouch (itself the result of several mergers) to
form Verizon, almost all of which was based on IS-95.
The last major nationwide system to form was Cingular,
after the various GSM carriers in the U.S. realized
they were in big trouble competing against Verizon and
Sprint and AT&T (which uses IS-136). Cingular doesn't
actually have a single standard; some parts use GSM,
some use other things.
Once the existence and commercial feasibility of the
CDMA air interface were established beyond doubt by
its use in IS-95, its advantages became clear. The
CDMA air interface was obviously drastically superior
to any kind of TDMA. For one thing, in any cellular
system that 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 somewhere between three and five
times as much. It's difficult to quantify because it
depends on terrain, and also because CDMA has "soft
capacity" .) Another advantage was that IS-95's
implementation of 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 each direction, and in GSM it's somewhat less
than 25 KHz. But human conversation doesn't use
bandwidth that way; when you're talking, I'm mostly
listening (maybe with an occasional "uh-huh"). 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 any protocol that uses a CDMA air interface, the
bandwidth used by a given phone in a call changes as
needed. In IS-95, for instance, it changes 50 times
per second, and can vary by a factor of 8:1, and the
phone uses as much or as little as it needs for each
20 millisecond frame. When I'm silent, I only use
1/8th of the peak bandwidth I use when I'm talking.
While that's very useful for voice, it's essential for
data, which tends to be extremely bursty.
Moreover, IS-95 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 bps and
14,400 bps). The CDMA air interface does not have any
hard bandwidth cap for any given channel (up to the
total bandwidth of the carrier). So when higher data
rates were desired, it was possible to upgrade the
hardware in IS-95 cells and create new cell phones
which could transmit 64 kilobits per second (and later
153 kilobits per second), while operating along side
existing handsets which had not been upgraded, sharing
the same carrier frequencies. So the same spectrum can
be used for both voice and data, with the allocation
changing between them up to 50 times per second.
The TDMA air interface used by GSM had a hard physical
bandwidth limit per channel of somewhat less than 25
kilobits per second. (Some capacity is lost to
protocol overhead and to time guard bands in the
timeslicing.) GSM permitted data to be sent on voice
channels, but increasing the bandwidth beyond that
fundamental allocation wasn't really possible. It
turned out that the only reasonable way to do it was
to graft on an entirely new system to support data,
which they called GPRS. GPRS does not share spectrum
with the existing voice system in GSM; it has to be
allocated its own portion of the licensed spectrum,
which meant that operating companies that deployed it
had to decrease the spectrum allocated for voice,
decreasing the number of subscribers they could
support. This turned out to be very unpopular with the
operating companies.
3G
With the push to greater and greater data rates,
everyone recognized that a new Third 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 (though not the precise version used by
IS-95). GSM was the very best propeller-driven fighter
aircraft that money could buy, and its implementation
of TDMA was the Merlin engine. 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, and any 3G system
which used a CDMA air interface was going to have an
overwhelming commercial advantage over any TDMA-based
system. TDMA was a dead end, and to create a 3G
version of GSM, Europe's electronics companies were
going to have to swallow their pride and admit that
Qualcomm had been right all along about the virtues of
the CDMA air interface. (And not incidentally, to
license Qualcomm's intellectual property, and pay
royalties on it.) The new system being designed to
replace GSM is called Universal Mobile
Telecommunications System (UMTS), and its air
interface is referred to as W-CDMA. Meanwhile, the
industry body which supported IS-95 was beginning work
on its own 3G system, which ended up being named CDMA
2000 (CDMA2K).
This article in the Economist says that the
development process for UMTS is not going well because
of technical problems in making W-CDMA work. Among
other problems, handsets from one company often don't
work with infrastructure from other companies, and all
the handsets tend to have short battery life.
When Qualcomm and its industry partners designed
CDMA2K, they were able to make it backward compatible
with IS-95 (in part because the CDMA2K chiprate is an
exact multiple of the IS-95 chiprate). Because of
that, a CDMA2K handset will work with IS-95
infrastructure, and an IS-95 handset will work with
CDMA2K infrastructure, and CDMA2K cells can sit next
to IS-95 cells and use the same spectrum. This is a
tremendous commercial advantage, because existing
operating companies using IS-95 can upgrade by
incrementally replacing individual cells as budget
allows and selling new handsets without having to
wholesale replace all existing ones. They can take an
existing IS-95 system using an existing spectrum
license, and phase it over without acquiring any new
spectrum, and do so over a period of years if need be.
None of that is true for the switch from GSM to UMTS.
CDMA and TDMA are fundamentally incompatible air
interfaces and there's no way to make UMTS support
existing GSM (TDMA) handsets using the same spectrum
as UMTS (W-CDMA) handsets. So GSM operators who want
to upgrade to UMTS either have to acquire new spectrum
(at huge expense), divide their already precious
spectrum up into parts for legacy GSM and new UMTS, or
cut the entire system over all at once. Each choice is
lousy, in different ways. In actual practice, UMTS
isn't an upgrade for GSM. It's a replacement.
If it happens at all. For the other thing they're
discovering in Europe is that making CDMA work well is
a lot harder than they thought it was.
Interoperability problems have been particularly
serious. This article talks about the experience that
DoCoMo had in Japan when it deployed the first UMTS
system in the world. The article 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 interoperability problems
with DoCoMo's infrastructure 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
upgrading more than a year ago, and CDMA2K has been
deployed elsewhere in the world, including 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's making possible
all kinds of new cool features. In Japan, half the
CDMA2K handsets which have been sold have cameras
built in and their users send each other pictures.
On the other hand, in Europe the GSM service providers
are in deep trouble. They spent truly vast amounts of
money, tens of billions of euros, on licenses for new
spectrum which they can't actually use yet (so they
are making no revenue off the investment). The
licenses specify that they can only be used for UMTS,
and none of the equipment suppliers is actually ready
for full scale deployment. Some of the operating
companies are talking about giving the licenses back
just to get out from under the payments. And others
are beginning to ask if they can have permission to
deploy CDMA2K, but the bureaucrats in the EU aren't
having any of it. (Yet.)
Schadenfreude
I confess to a deep feeling of satisfaction about this
on a personal level, primarily because of all the
harassment I put up with from GSM fans over the years
when they talked about how superior the European
approach was.
If the U.S. had followed the same policy as Europe and
mandated a standard, the CDMA air interface would
never have been given the chance to prove itself. We
in the U.S. now have just as good of nationwide
systems and just as much roaming ability as the
Europeans do, only our best systems are fundamentally
better on a technical level than the best European
systems, and are upgrading sooner with less pain. I
can use my Verizon handset nearly anywhere in the U.S.
or Canada that has cellular coverage at all (which is
an area much larger than the EU), either directly on
Verizon or roaming on a compatible system (such as
Canada's Bell Mobility).
So I'm sitting here basking in the warm glow of
schadenfreude. Regardless of the merits of GSM versus
IS-95, CDMA has soundly defeated TDMA, and until
something better comes along, all future proposals for
cell system protocols will use some form of CDMA air
interface.
Morality Tale
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 it
demonstrates quite clearly why the American philosophy
is more successful.
Though the adoption of a continent-wide standard for
Europe in the 1990's did have certain substantial
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 manufacturers
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.
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
interesting to see whether they can ever get it to
really work well (with low power usage in the handsets
and interoperability problems solved), and more
importantly, whether they'll take so long doing it as
to miss the market window. I think they will
eventually make it work, but I think it will be too
late. Much of GSM's dominance worldwide over IS-95 was
due to its mindshare victory, but as UMTS continues to
have problems and CDMA2K continues to work well, that
is extremely likely to erode.
Here are some key lessons:
First, Europe pulled this decision up to as high a
level as it could. The legal mandate to use GSM was
passed by the European Commission. In the U.S., that
decision was pushed down as far as possible, and the
superiority of CDMA over TDMA was decided by
individual operating companies and 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 still does, and if a
newer air interface technology comes along which is
superior to CDMA, it will have the same opportunity
commercially that IS-95 had. (Not quite; the market
has evolved and we're into the "consolidation,
standardization and shakeout" phase now, which is much
more difficult for upstarts. But there won't be any
government mandate preventing deployment of some
future technology, because the FCC still doesn't
mandate any standard.)
Europe emphasized cooperation over competition,
centralized wisdom and control over distributed
creativity, bureaucracy and regulation over freedom of
choice. It was viewed as important that there be
compatibility over the whole continent, and to achieve
that they outlawed competition and created a monopoly.
In the U.S., 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.
And the final irony is that the GSM upgrade to UMTS is
using a version of the CDMA air interface, which would
never have had the chance to prove itself if the U.S.
had adopted the European approach. Europe's cellular
technology will be improved (if they can get it to
work) because the FCC ignored Europe's advice.
In the mean time, the long-term fallout of the EC/EU's
policy is that a lot of the cellular operating
companies in Europe are in deep financial trouble, not
to mention facing legal deadlines for deployment of
UMTS 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 Â400 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 potentially 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 and each failing
company pulls another over the edge of the cliff.
(Actually, what you'll see is huge government
subsidies to prop them up, creatively packaged to
evade EU regulations.)
Another of the ironies in this is that "cooperative"
Europe has turned out to not cooperate as well as
"competitive America." The UMTS interoperability
problems clearly show that they're having difficulty
cooperating on a detailed technical level. On the
other hand, the companies involved in the CDMA2K
process are cooperating closely because it's in their
own narrow self interest to do so. (For instance,
there's an independent testing laboratory for
compatibility established by the industry which is
used by all manufacturers including Qualcomm. The
cellular operating companies are part of this industry
body, and they insisted on it.) The companies in the
CDMA2K process are cooperating closely because they
know they'll be killed if they don't, not to mention
the fact that they smell GSM's blood and know that
they've stolen a march on UMTS and have an opportunity
to cause a major shift in the balance of power in the
world cellular industry (all the more so because UMTS,
as a replacement for GSM rather than an upgrade, isn't
really much more attractive for existing GSM service
providers than CDMA2K would be).
This kind of thing has played out much the same way
hundreds of times before between Europe and the U.S.,
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 knowledge and wisdom. The "center" chose GSM (and
thus TDMA) to be the winner; America decided to let
the market pick the winner, and it didn't turn out to
be TDMA. And now Europe is switching to the superior
CDMA air interface which could never have been
developed in Europe because of government regulation.
European centralization turned out to be a competitive
advantage - for the U.S. And that's going to keep
happening. If I were vicious and wanted to wish
commercial failure and misery on Europe, I could think
of nothing better to inflict on 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, and will make binding technological
decisions based on politics and ideology.
Steven Den Beste is a retired software engineer who
now spends his time writing for his web site, USS
Clueless.
Told You So...
By Steven Den Beste 10/21/2002
I used to work for Qualcomm designing cell phones.
Qualcomm is the company that invented the CDMA cell
phone and made it practical and made it into a market
success. It is now the leading system in the American
market.
And right now I'm basking in the evil glow of a major
case of schadenfreude.
But allow me to explain why. And bear with me: this
article has a lot of technical jargon. But it's worth
it if you plow through to understand how flexibility
and ingenuity in a competitive system will trump
planning and central control any time.
Cell Hell
The original cell phones were analog, using fairly
straightforward FM channels for voice communication
(technically, Frequency Division Multiple Access or
FDMA). When your phone was in a call, it was granted
an FM channel by the cell and used it exclusively
until the call ended. FM encoding used spectrum
extremely inefficiently. Spectrum (RF bandwidth
licensed from a governmental authority) was scarce and
expensive, and it rapidly became clear that FM wasn't
able to handle the traffic that was necessary to make
cellular telephony a profitable business through
economy of scale. Though the system as a whole was
known as the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), it
became obvious that it wasn't very advanced..
One obvious approach to this problem was to digitally
encode the voice traffic and compress it. This
approach led to the first Time Division Multiple
Access (TDMA) digital systems, which take a single
channel and timeshare it among several phones. Each
phone digitizes and compresses its voice traffic and
transceives it during its assigned timeslice. In the
first TDMA-based cell phone system deployed in the US
(which was controlled by TIA/EIA standard IS-136), a
30 KHz (times 2) channel which had carried only one
voice call with AMPS could now carry three digitized
calls, making it a nice upgrade.
GSM Gloaters
Meanwhile, a consortium of European companies designed
the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM)
which abandoned the old channel size entirely. They
allocated 200 KHz channels (times 2) and divided them
into 8 slices, giving each phone somewhat less than 25
KHz effective bandwidth (each direction).
"FDMA" and "TDMA" are examples of air interfaces.
"AMPS", "IS-136" and "GSM" are full cellular protocol
stacks, which include specifications for the air
interfaces they use but contain much more besides,
most of which is not directly related to the air
interface. If GSM is a Corvette, TDMA would be the
tires mounted on it. The tires carry the car, and
ultimately do set limits on performance, but the tires
don't have anything to do with the stereo in the car,
or how comfortable the bucket seats are.
GSM was clearly superior to both IS-136 and IDEN (a
Motorola design which Moto refused to license to
anyone else, killing its commercial viability). As one
of its first significant actions, the European
Commission decided that 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 1990's, everyone in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 which were mutually incompatible, in Europe
anyone could carry their phone almost anywhere in the
continent, and if they couldn't use it they could move
their SIMM into a local phone and use that.
U.S. Emerges
Of course, that apparent chaos in the U.S. 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 and consolidation in a developing
market environment. But this government policy of
keeping its hands off meant that industry players were
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 kind of cell phone air interface called Code
Division Multiple Access, or CDMA.
CDMA is a form of Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum
(DSS) and is ultimately based on an idea patented in
the 1940's by Hedy Lamarr. (Who says beauty and brains
don't fit in the same package?) CDMA is radical in
many ways. By far the most obvious radical shift 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. Qualcomm and other companies created a
cellular phone specification based on CDMA, which was
eventually published as IS-95 under the auspices of
the EIA, TIA and JEDEC.
In fact, Qualcomm's CDMA proposal was so revolutionary
that when it was first discussed, many thought it
couldn't be made to work. 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 how I
felt about this. Now I'm no longer associated with the
company, and I can indulge in a rant.
At first, the most vocal top brains at Ericsson tried
to claim that CDMA violated Information Theory, Claude
Shannon's vitally important contribution to nearly
everything in electronics. In the IS-95 implementation
of CDMA, a single carrier frequency has a bandwidth of
1.2288 MHz, each direction, 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 be a case of trying to fit
fifty million bits into a one-and-a-quarter MHz sack,
which would indeed violate Shannon. The mistake they
made was that chips aren't "information" based on
Shannon's definition. Each chip contains only a small
fraction of a bit of true information (which is why
they're called "chips") and though those phones were
sending chips at an immense rate, the actual bit-rate
per second was either 9600 or 14,400 (depending on the
voice compression codec being used).
Unfortunately for Ericsson's claims of physical
impossibility, 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
while communicating with multiple cells all of which
also operated on the same frequency. (And they proved
that soft handoff worked, too, by driving around
during calls.)
OK, Ericsson's voices said, maybe it does work, but
it's going to be too expensive. Everyone knew that the
electronics required to make CDMA work was a lot more
complicated than what TDMA needed, and Ericsson's loud
voices claimed that it could never be reduced in price
enough to make it competitive.
Only problem was that Qualcomm proved that wrong, too,
by beginning to produce both infrastructure and phones
at competitive prices. (Qualcomm did this to bootstrap
the industry. It's no longer in either business.) Both
were more expensive than competing systems, but not
enough to make it commercially uncompetitive, and with
rising volume and increasing experience, as well as
continued advances in the IC industry, the prices are
now pretty close to the same.
At which point Ericsson suddenly decided that it had
applicable patents and took Qualcomm to court. Over
the long drawn out process of litigation, every
important preliminary court judgment went in favor of
Qualcomm, and after most of Ericsson's infringement
claims were summarily dismissed it became obvious that
Ericsson didn't have a case, and equally obvious 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 was a fullscale surrender by Ericsson.
Nokia wasn't as foolish and had licensed several years
before. (Just in passing, the people at Ericsson who
have my contempt are in the front office. Their
engineers are as good as anyone else's.)
Order Out of Chaos
In the years of apparent chaos in the U.S., when loud
voices in Europe proclaimed the clear advantage of a
single continental standard, order began to appear.
Small companies using compatible 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 using the 1900 MHz version of
IS-95 (ANSI J-STD-008, later merged into IS-95). Bell
Atlantic Mobile acquired GTE Mobile (who had been a
joint partner in PrimeCo), and eventually merged with
Airtouch (itself the result of several mergers) to
form Verizon, almost all of which was based on IS-95.
The last major nationwide system to form was Cingular,
after the various GSM carriers in the U.S. realized
they were in big trouble competing against Verizon and
Sprint and AT&T (which uses IS-136). Cingular doesn't
actually have a single standard; some parts use GSM,
some use other things.
Once the existence and commercial feasibility of the
CDMA air interface were established beyond doubt by
its use in IS-95, its advantages became clear. The
CDMA air interface was obviously drastically superior
to any kind of TDMA. For one thing, in any cellular
system that 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 somewhere between three and five
times as much. It's difficult to quantify because it
depends on terrain, and also because CDMA has "soft
capacity" .) Another advantage was that IS-95's
implementation of 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 each direction, and in GSM it's somewhat less
than 25 KHz. But human conversation doesn't use
bandwidth that way; when you're talking, I'm mostly
listening (maybe with an occasional "uh-huh"). 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 any protocol that uses a CDMA air interface, the
bandwidth used by a given phone in a call changes as
needed. In IS-95, for instance, it changes 50 times
per second, and can vary by a factor of 8:1, and the
phone uses as much or as little as it needs for each
20 millisecond frame. When I'm silent, I only use
1/8th of the peak bandwidth I use when I'm talking.
While that's very useful for voice, it's essential for
data, which tends to be extremely bursty.
Moreover, IS-95 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 bps and
14,400 bps). The CDMA air interface does not have any
hard bandwidth cap for any given channel (up to the
total bandwidth of the carrier). So when higher data
rates were desired, it was possible to upgrade the
hardware in IS-95 cells and create new cell phones
which could transmit 64 kilobits per second (and later
153 kilobits per second), while operating along side
existing handsets which had not been upgraded, sharing
the same carrier frequencies. So the same spectrum can
be used for both voice and data, with the allocation
changing between them up to 50 times per second.
The TDMA air interface used by GSM had a hard physical
bandwidth limit per channel of somewhat less than 25
kilobits per second. (Some capacity is lost to
protocol overhead and to time guard bands in the
timeslicing.) GSM permitted data to be sent on voice
channels, but increasing the bandwidth beyond that
fundamental allocation wasn't really possible. It
turned out that the only reasonable way to do it was
to graft on an entirely new system to support data,
which they called GPRS. GPRS does not share spectrum
with the existing voice system in GSM; it has to be
allocated its own portion of the licensed spectrum,
which meant that operating companies that deployed it
had to decrease the spectrum allocated for voice,
decreasing the number of subscribers they could
support. This turned out to be very unpopular with the
operating companies.
3G
With the push to greater and greater data rates,
everyone recognized that a new Third 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 (though not the precise version used by
IS-95). GSM was the very best propeller-driven fighter
aircraft that money could buy, and its implementation
of TDMA was the Merlin engine. 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, and any 3G system
which used a CDMA air interface was going to have an
overwhelming commercial advantage over any TDMA-based
system. TDMA was a dead end, and to create a 3G
version of GSM, Europe's electronics companies were
going to have to swallow their pride and admit that
Qualcomm had been right all along about the virtues of
the CDMA air interface. (And not incidentally, to
license Qualcomm's intellectual property, and pay
royalties on it.) The new system being designed to
replace GSM is called Universal Mobile
Telecommunications System (UMTS), and its air
interface is referred to as W-CDMA. Meanwhile, the
industry body which supported IS-95 was beginning work
on its own 3G system, which ended up being named CDMA
2000 (CDMA2K).
This article in the Economist says that the
development process for UMTS is not going well because
of technical problems in making W-CDMA work. Among
other problems, handsets from one company often don't
work with infrastructure from other companies, and all
the handsets tend to have short battery life.
When Qualcomm and its industry partners designed
CDMA2K, they were able to make it backward compatible
with IS-95 (in part because the CDMA2K chiprate is an
exact multiple of the IS-95 chiprate). Because of
that, a CDMA2K handset will work with IS-95
infrastructure, and an IS-95 handset will work with
CDMA2K infrastructure, and CDMA2K cells can sit next
to IS-95 cells and use the same spectrum. This is a
tremendous commercial advantage, because existing
operating companies using IS-95 can upgrade by
incrementally replacing individual cells as budget
allows and selling new handsets without having to
wholesale replace all existing ones. They can take an
existing IS-95 system using an existing spectrum
license, and phase it over without acquiring any new
spectrum, and do so over a period of years if need be.
None of that is true for the switch from GSM to UMTS.
CDMA and TDMA are fundamentally incompatible air
interfaces and there's no way to make UMTS support
existing GSM (TDMA) handsets using the same spectrum
as UMTS (W-CDMA) handsets. So GSM operators who want
to upgrade to UMTS either have to acquire new spectrum
(at huge expense), divide their already precious
spectrum up into parts for legacy GSM and new UMTS, or
cut the entire system over all at once. Each choice is
lousy, in different ways. In actual practice, UMTS
isn't an upgrade for GSM. It's a replacement.
If it happens at all. For the other thing they're
discovering in Europe is that making CDMA work well is
a lot harder than they thought it was.
Interoperability problems have been particularly
serious. This article talks about the experience that
DoCoMo had in Japan when it deployed the first UMTS
system in the world. The article 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 interoperability problems
with DoCoMo's infrastructure 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
upgrading more than a year ago, and CDMA2K has been
deployed elsewhere in the world, including 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's making possible
all kinds of new cool features. In Japan, half the
CDMA2K handsets which have been sold have cameras
built in and their users send each other pictures.
On the other hand, in Europe the GSM service providers
are in deep trouble. They spent truly vast amounts of
money, tens of billions of euros, on licenses for new
spectrum which they can't actually use yet (so they
are making no revenue off the investment). The
licenses specify that they can only be used for UMTS,
and none of the equipment suppliers is actually ready
for full scale deployment. Some of the operating
companies are talking about giving the licenses back
just to get out from under the payments. And others
are beginning to ask if they can have permission to
deploy CDMA2K, but the bureaucrats in the EU aren't
having any of it. (Yet.)
Schadenfreude
I confess to a deep feeling of satisfaction about this
on a personal level, primarily because of all the
harassment I put up with from GSM fans over the years
when they talked about how superior the European
approach was.
If the U.S. had followed the same policy as Europe and
mandated a standard, the CDMA air interface would
never have been given the chance to prove itself. We
in the U.S. now have just as good of nationwide
systems and just as much roaming ability as the
Europeans do, only our best systems are fundamentally
better on a technical level than the best European
systems, and are upgrading sooner with less pain. I
can use my Verizon handset nearly anywhere in the U.S.
or Canada that has cellular coverage at all (which is
an area much larger than the EU), either directly on
Verizon or roaming on a compatible system (such as
Canada's Bell Mobility).
So I'm sitting here basking in the warm glow of
schadenfreude. Regardless of the merits of GSM versus
IS-95, CDMA has soundly defeated TDMA, and until
something better comes along, all future proposals for
cell system protocols will use some form of CDMA air
interface.
Morality Tale
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 it
demonstrates quite clearly why the American philosophy
is more successful.
Though the adoption of a continent-wide standard for
Europe in the 1990's did have certain substantial
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 manufacturers
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.
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
interesting to see whether they can ever get it to
really work well (with low power usage in the handsets
and interoperability problems solved), and more
importantly, whether they'll take so long doing it as
to miss the market window. I think they will
eventually make it work, but I think it will be too
late. Much of GSM's dominance worldwide over IS-95 was
due to its mindshare victory, but as UMTS continues to
have problems and CDMA2K continues to work well, that
is extremely likely to erode.
Here are some key lessons:
First, Europe pulled this decision up to as high a
level as it could. The legal mandate to use GSM was
passed by the European Commission. In the U.S., that
decision was pushed down as far as possible, and the
superiority of CDMA over TDMA was decided by
individual operating companies and 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 still does, and if a
newer air interface technology comes along which is
superior to CDMA, it will have the same opportunity
commercially that IS-95 had. (Not quite; the market
has evolved and we're into the "consolidation,
standardization and shakeout" phase now, which is much
more difficult for upstarts. But there won't be any
government mandate preventing deployment of some
future technology, because the FCC still doesn't
mandate any standard.)
Europe emphasized cooperation over competition,
centralized wisdom and control over distributed
creativity, bureaucracy and regulation over freedom of
choice. It was viewed as important that there be
compatibility over the whole continent, and to achieve
that they outlawed competition and created a monopoly.
In the U.S., 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.
And the final irony is that the GSM upgrade to UMTS is
using a version of the CDMA air interface, which would
never have had the chance to prove itself if the U.S.
had adopted the European approach. Europe's cellular
technology will be improved (if they can get it to
work) because the FCC ignored Europe's advice.
In the mean time, the long-term fallout of the EC/EU's
policy is that a lot of the cellular operating
companies in Europe are in deep financial trouble, not
to mention facing legal deadlines for deployment of
UMTS 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 Â400 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 potentially 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 and each failing
company pulls another over the edge of the cliff.
(Actually, what you'll see is huge government
subsidies to prop them up, creatively packaged to
evade EU regulations.)
Another of the ironies in this is that "cooperative"
Europe has turned out to not cooperate as well as
"competitive America." The UMTS interoperability
problems clearly show that they're having difficulty
cooperating on a detailed technical level. On the
other hand, the companies involved in the CDMA2K
process are cooperating closely because it's in their
own narrow self interest to do so. (For instance,
there's an independent testing laboratory for
compatibility established by the industry which is
used by all manufacturers including Qualcomm. The
cellular operating companies are part of this industry
body, and they insisted on it.) The companies in the
CDMA2K process are cooperating closely because they
know they'll be killed if they don't, not to mention
the fact that they smell GSM's blood and know that
they've stolen a march on UMTS and have an opportunity
to cause a major shift in the balance of power in the
world cellular industry (all the more so because UMTS,
as a replacement for GSM rather than an upgrade, isn't
really much more attractive for existing GSM service
providers than CDMA2K would be).
This kind of thing has played out much the same way
hundreds of times before between Europe and the U.S.,
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 knowledge and wisdom. The "center" chose GSM (and
thus TDMA) to be the winner; America decided to let
the market pick the winner, and it didn't turn out to
be TDMA. And now Europe is switching to the superior
CDMA air interface which could never have been
developed in Europe because of government regulation.
European centralization turned out to be a competitive
advantage - for the U.S. And that's going to keep
happening. If I were vicious and wanted to wish
commercial failure and misery on Europe, I could think
of nothing better to inflict on 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, and will make binding technological
decisions based on politics and ideology.
Steven Den Beste is a retired software engineer who
now spends his time writing for his web site, USS
Clueless.
The Dope
Hi.
xfer
I JERK OFF TO ARCTOPUS
xfer
I JERK OFF TO ARCTOPUS
The Dope
Hi.
Stultus
Words to live by
xfer
I JERK OFF TO ARCTOPUS
