Google Pulls Support For CDMA Devices 272
An anonymous reader writes "Google has just made some interesting changes to their developer pages. As of today, all of the documentation, source code, and firmware images pertaining to CDMA Android devices (including the Verizon Galaxy Nexus) have been removed. A statement from Google explains that the proprietary software required to make these devices fully functional got in the way of Android's open source nature, so CDMA devices are no longer supported as developer hardware. What does this mean for the Galaxy Nexus, which is only available as CDMA in the U.S.?"
Arm Twist Google Style (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Arm Twist Google Style (Score:5, Insightful)
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Considering that telecom's are usually extremely picky about technologies, it is a bit baffling that they choose a standard that is essentially closed source (CDMA).
Such a state has no bearing or impact on their decision. If they're going to roll out a network using such a standard, the vendor will reveal all that is asked.
The Galaxy Nexus will work just fine (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Galaxy Nexus will work just fine (Score:5, Informative)
False, Google is simply removing source code from the developer pages because surprise, surprise it didn't work anyway. CDMA as implemented in Android devices relies on a binary blob from the manufacturers. This means AOSP doesn't support CDMA because the code is incomplete.
The only thing that changes now is that people can stop complaining that the code doesn't work since it now doesn't exist. Carriers / Manufacturers will continue to work together to create binary drivers for CDMA, and anyone wishing to implement AOSP will need to hack at the binary driver to make it work.
Situation normal.
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The Galaxy Nexus will continue to work just fine on CDMA. For future models, well, that's another story...
Google forces the industry to either open up their firmware or move on to GSM. Good thing, IMO.
It's a good thing.... unless you bought a Galaxy Nexus in the US, and didn't pay a fortune to import a GSM (and slower) version... in which case Google just tossed us out in the cold stripping practically the entire reason for buying a GNEX away.
But otherwise, it's awesome.. or something....
There is still a GSM version avaliable in the USA (Score:2)
Pulled *developer* CDMA support only (Score:5, Informative)
And only for some features [androidcommunity.com]. Consumer phones will of course still be fully supported, receive all updates etc.
AOSP builds from source have never had full telephony function for CDMA devices due to missing carrier binaries, so Google is moving to clarify this, and is no longer listing CDMA devices as fully supported for developers.
W-CDMA (UTMS) in Japan (Score:5, Informative)
In Japan, they also have W-CDMA (UMTS), but at least the phones there typically use uSIM cards, which just happen to be similar to GSM SIM cards.
I can take any unlocked phone that supports UMTS, and put in any uSIM card from any other the 3 major carriers (softbank, au, & docomo) and it will work.
However in the USA, CMDA based carriers refused to allow any type of uSIM support for their networks, since they want users to be locked down to their networks. Even if you paid the extra $$$ for an unlocked iPhone 4S, you cannot get it work on both Sprint and Verizon the networks. The iPhone unlock is only for GSM not CDMA in the USA. The same is also true for Android phones as well.
I am very happy to see Google finally stand up against the horrible CMDA situation in the USA. As previous commenters have stated, it would be nice if either CMDA went away, or they followed the example of Japan, and are required to have uSIM cards.
The goal should be to have every unlocked smart-phone unlocked and able to work with every carrier, but simply inserting a SIM/uSIM card. Personally I think it is horrible that smart-phones are not required to be unlocked, since these phones are typically not subsidized with 2-3 year contacts that covers the full cost of the phone many times over.
Re:W-CDMA (UTMS) in Japan (Score:4, Insightful)
"since these phones are typically not subsidized with 2-3 year contacts that covers the full cost of the phone many times over"
The phones aren't subsidized to the consumer. If you come to AT&T with a fully unlocked phone, you get no discount from their monthly rate.
Same is true for Verizon and Sprint.
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The problem w/ SIM cards (Score:2)
The problem that I've always had w/ SIM cards is that they have only a fraction of the capabilities of one's main phone. On the phone, if you are storing the different numbers of a person, as long as you are storing it in the phone memory, you can, under his/her name, store Main#, Home#, Work#, Cell# and Pager#, However, if you wanted to save something like that on a SIM, the SIM would take it down as 5 different numbers, and looking @ them, one wouldn't have a clue.
In between, I used to notice some sto
Re:The problem w/ SIM cards (Score:4, Informative)
Storing contact info on the SIM is best treated as a secondary, legacy function. For any more complicated set of personal data you're better off exporting it in some standard-ish format your new phone can handle, or syncing it via some external service. Also, at least all the HTC Android phones I've seen seem to have no difficulty pulling the data from other devices via Bluetooth.
Being able to switch providers or phones by moving SIMs is worth even inputting the contact data manually, imo.
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Two of the Best Given the Shaft? (Score:2)
The point is openness (Score:2)
Which do you think is stronger, the provider who keeps customers by locking them in or the provider who keeps customers by providing superior service? Which is the better customers, those who stay with you because they are trapped or those who stay with you because they like you?
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The one who offers the iPhone, as seen from Verizon's results, now that they can sell the iphone...
Misleading title is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Google isn't "Dropping" CDMA support. CDMA Android phones aren't going anywhere any time soon - they're just not supporting them as DEVELOPER devices. Due to issues with Custom ROMs not working as best they could (due to the proprietary components required), Google is basically saying that the CDMA Nexus phones are no better than any other non-nexus device when it comes to "official" developer support. They'll still exist, they'll still be sold, updated, etc. but they won't be classed as "Developer devices". That's it.
This isn't anything new, it was the same case with the Nexus S 4G and even the Xoom.
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Similar to how you would write code for iOS or Windows, I suspect- neither of which give you the source code. You just write to the APIs and hope to catch everything else in testing.
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Really? The computer software I write and debug has access to the OS source code behind the API. Because APIs are never completely/properly documented, they have bugs, the behavior changes after initial release, etc. That's why I write SW for Linux. That's why it was valuable for Android to be open source.
Maybe this move means only the CDMA code isn't open source. So designing and debugging code that calls CDMA OS code is now in a proprietary environment. That might be only part of the scene that's closed,
What about my Samsung Galaxy S II (T989)? (Score:3)
A few minutes of googling would probably bring me up to speed on the telecom acronyms, but I always thought AT&T and TMobile used GSM and all of the faster technologies were built on top of the GSM framework... EDGE, HSDPA and stuff like that. Similarly, I believed Sprint and Verizon use CDMA based technology and built subsequent enhancements on top of those.
Here's where my confusion comes in though. Looking at my phone, I go to "Menu" -> "Settings" -> "Wireless and network" -> "Mobile networks" -> "Network mode" and I see three options. One is GSM/WCDMA (Auto mode), another is GSM only and the last is WCDMA only. So now I'm curious about what's going on here.
I'm packing up for a road trip right now but I hope to come back here and someone who knows what they are talking about will spell it out in simple, understandable terms for me, because clearly, I don't know what I thought I knew.
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W-CDMA [wikipedia.org] is the air interface standard adopted by 3GPP for UMTS cellular networks based on, and backwards compatible with, GSM. It uses basically the same channel access method, called code division multiple access, as the incompatible standard named CDMA which got widely adopted in North America. The consortium responsible for CDMA went their own ways and developed CDMA2000, which is what CDMA carriers use as their 3G network technology.
udev? (Score:3)
Why does this sound like the decision to allow udev to separate the loadable module from the proprietary firmware? Sound to me like Google is doing nothing more than saying, "You have to pay the license fees to include the firmware for CDMA."
No Android for Sprint or Verizon? (Score:2)
Both Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, and account for many millions of Android phone users. Does Google's move mean no more upgrades to their existing phones? And no new phones for them?
Maybe 3G and 4G aren't "CDMA" as Google defines them. Or maybe this move is a temporary restructuring. Or maybe it's Google forcing some concession from Verizon and Sprint, either in CDMA licensing or something else. Because I can't see the wisdom of Google just cutting off the majority of its US smartphone users.
Custom ROM's (Score:2)
There probably has been a lot of whining in back channels about custom ROM's being created which strip out carrier crap.
Additionally there is the Motorola deal... umm... Motorola is one of the LARGEST CDMA licensees....hmmmm..
Something more is afoot, and the lack of transparency , probably due to the BS NDA's etc. is just annoying.
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:5, Funny)
It's used in the US, where they are 20 years behind the rest of the world in mobile phones.
Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. Now that it's all being ripped out and replaced with 3G there's a lot of GSM hardware on the second-hand market. It's not even expensive.
Make things easy on yourselves. Take that giant leap into the year 2000.
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. ... Take that giant leap into the year 2000.
What are you talking about? GSM has been available in the U.S. since before 2000. It's not our fault some carriers hold onto CDMA. But really, you can't blame them when it worked perfectly well for their purposes. Me, I think a lot of it was to make it more difficult for people to use second-hand phones, since you can't just swap your service from one phone to another on your own like you can GSM.
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that East Asian deployments of CDMA2000 use SIM for network authentication - changing phones in Japan, Korea, or India is as simple as moving a little smartcard around. Just like in GSM. Don't hold me to it, but it might also apply to CDMA2000 networks in Eastern Europe.
Only in the Americas do CDMA2000 networks still use MEID for authentication, as far as I know.
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:5, Insightful)
Only in the Americas do CDMA2000 networks still use MEID for authentication, as far as I know.
So... you're agreeing with me then? Yes, perhaps there are some versions of CDMA that have the flexibility of SIMs, but that's not what the U.S. carriers deployed. That still jives with my idea the choice was entirely deliberate to help carriers maintain control of hardware (and customers) and boost contract re-ups, etc.
It's just another method of creating artificial business barriers in an increasingly small world. Like region encoding DVDs and the U.S. adopting ATSC for HD broadcasting instead of using DVB-T or ISDB.
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Well there's that, but these days, people are becoming increasingly accustomed to high priced phones and changing them out when new models come out. I don't like the trend, but it is what it is. My old Sansung Vibrant was and still is a great phone with its being rooted and having custom firmware. My Samsung Titanium hasn't been rooted yet and has bloatware and all that crap still... (Holding out hope for an ICS upgrade OTA which is supposed to be "any day now" right?) I'll probably get tired of waiting
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Often a trend isn't obvious until it's peaking, and on the verge of being stale (or outright untenable).
.
In 3 years from now, I just can't imagine people will still be paying $1500/year for a phone + service. It's a lot of money!
Granted, it's paying for a massive infrastructure buildup. I keep waiting for a p
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"It's just another method of creating artificial business barriers in an increasingly small world. Like region encoding DVDs and the U.S. adopting ATSC for HD broadcasting instead of using DVB-T or ISDB."
You really don't know what you're talking about.
If you had ever served on a standards committee, you would know that competing standards are not
a plot to screw the consumer, but are the result of an inability of people from different countries to
agree on things.
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Only in the Americas do CDMA2000 networks still use MEID for authentication, as far as I know.
Only in the USA, as far as I know... here in Canada, Telus/Bell (and their subsidiaries and hangers-on) are using a WCDMA/HSPA network on 850/1900, and they've switched to SIM cards too. They do still support CDMA devices, as they've sold them, but they don't sell them any more. The only other major players in the country were using GSM with SIM cards all along.
Actually, I think even in the USA, they've changed their tune... Verizon used to be the only holdout, and a quick search of their website shows that
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Oh, I'm quite familiar with Wind/Mobilicity and their famous rates. I'm also familiar with how the town I live in is *just* outside their coverage areas for Ottawa, and have been on the 'planned expansion' list for both carriers for almost 2 years. I'm aware that they're having some issues getting licensing from the CRTC and building towers, but there's only so long I'm willing to wait without any kind of update from them. Even if I won't get it for another couple of years, they could at least tell me *when
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True for iPhones you buy from Verizon, not true for iPhones you use on Verizon, but bought from Apple stores
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Correct - The only Verizon phones with SIM slots are:
1) "global" phones that were dual-mode GSM/CDMA2000 for global roaming
2) LTE devices, since LTE requires a SIM. The SIM is, to my knowledge, not used for the legacy CDMA interfaces.
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You *can* do this in the US with certain phones/carriers. My Immix Wireless Galaxy S is unlocked out of the box and I can insert any sim and go. Now my neighbors super plain Jane at&t phone won't accept my immix sim as the phone is sim locked.
Same with my old Verizon Blackberry Storm. I had to call Verizon and tell them I was traveling to Europe and being provided a sim for them to unlock the phone.. which I then promptly moved to immix wireless using an immix sim card
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Not for me. Anecdotal complaints about coverage are largely pointless.
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I work in a lab that programs, tests, and services phones on all four carriers. You are absolutely correct in your statement! Sprint and Verizon both were using CDMA for that reason. Verizon has now switched to LTE for quite a bit of it's network but Sprint is still using a combination of CDMA and WiMax. While AT&T and T-Mobile were using GSM but have now mostly switched to HSDPA(HSPA+) and LTE respectively.
What most people don't realize is that none of the technologies that are currently out can truly be called 4G! Unlike 3G, there is no specific standard for what is considered 4G service yet. The industry is saying that these specifications are in development, but right now 4G is more of a gimmick to get consumers to buy the latest and greatest thing! 2G service came out around 1995, 3G came out around 2005. Mobile infrastructures, in the USA at least, seem to be on a ten year cycle. With that said there most likely will not be a "4G standard" till around 2015. Sprint actually has the most right to call it's network 4G, not because of speed, but because it is the 4th generation of it's network.
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:5, Informative)
According to Wikipedia (and its cited sources), the 4G spec was finalized in 2008, and would require the ability for sustained data rates of 100Mbps. Current networks don't meet that, but LTE-Advanced could, and is only a firmware upgrade removed from current LTE systems.
Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#Requirements [wikipedia.org] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMT_Advanced [wikipedia.org]
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:4, Insightful)
I love ignorant fools opening their mouths. They make asses of themselves and don't even realize it.
You are aware that CDMA is technologically superiour to GSM in EVERY way. In fact, CDMA is most comparable to WCDMA/UMTS, as they're both 3G technologies and WCDMA/UMTS in fact borrowed heavily from CDMA for their air interface. GSM is the most widly deployed network architecture, true, but don't think for a second it's because it's superior. It's because it's cheap. Period.
The USA was the first to roll out 2G, half went with CDMA, half went with GSM. The GSM crowd because it was an international standard, and the CDMA crowd because it was far superior to GSM, and cost wasn't that different because GSM had yet to have wide spread deployment to drive cost down. As time went on though, since CDMA is heavily patented by Qualcomm, it meant the price stayed high when the rest of the world started rolling out their networks, so they went with the cheaper GSM.
I also have a theory that part of GSMs adoption in europe is due to a very "europe first" mentality, and due to strong american ties to CDMA, they didn't want to go that way, but again, just a theory on my part, and the cost probably was the bigger motivator.
Lastly, CDMA as deployed in the USA is a 3G technology, why ditch it for a 2G network? At least tell us to ditch it and go with UMTS. Oh, and the US also has every one of those technologies deployed. AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM/UMTS networks, Verizon and Sprint are CDMA networks. And everybody seems to be heading to LTE for 4G networks.
-A cellular network R&D engineer.
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I know. To think that if we had only made the RIGHT choice I could have been completely unable to buy my N900!
Vendor locked devices! No carrier mobility! The SUPERIOR way!
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One more point that's missing, the final product, coverage. Verizon works everywhere in the US...I have found parts of eastern Oregon and deep canyons in AZ lack, but c'mon, most everywhere. Whether it's ubiquitous towers or superior range/freq I haven't a clue, it just works. However, their business practices are their fatal flaw. VZW's announcement to charge a fee to pay was my final straw, I went to Tmo and it works most places around town and the fringes, but I wouldn't want to be relying on it in rural
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Technical superiority is not all there is to things, and sometimes a bad standard that enables interoperability is much better than a good standard that does not. USB is a classic example of that.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
In a GSM network, you need to use several frequencies to deploy one layer of the network, so that a cell doesn't interfere with a close cell. Using 7 frequencies for example allows a cell and all its immediate neighbor cells (using an hexagonal paving) to have different frequencies. Then the the closest cell with the same frequency is not adjacent but one hop further, and its interference is reduced.
In a CDMA network, all cells in a layer can use the same frequency. Now a mobile close to its cell where the signal is high is fine, but a mobile far from its cell and hence close to another neighbor cell will suffer interference. But this can be mitigated. In CDMA the bandwidth is split between codes, and neighbor can share the code space without trampling on each other feet and creating undue interference. There's still interference at the edge, and for a give frequency the cell capacity is lower than in GSM. But now you could use the 7 frequencies of GSM to provide 7 layers instead of a single one. And you gain in total capacity. In other words, reuse 1 reduce the capacity for a single frequency, but allows maximizing the usage of each frequency, and maximizing the network capacity. That's what got every operator so excited.
This being said, CDMA as deployed in CDMA2000/EVDO networks is now pretty backward and expansive. That's why all US CDMA operators are so eager to move to LTE and leave it behind. HSPA+ is much better, and what is amusing is that it kind of move away from the CDMA tenets to introduce back TDM principles (GSM is TDM based). HSPA+ is still CDMA based, but instead of transmitting over a few codes for a long time (as initially done with CDMA), it transmits for a short duration and use most codes. And multiplexing is done over time (as in TDM). Because it turns out that this is most efficient.
Anyway, you can safely ignore fanboys of either GSM or CDMA. It's our past. The future is now and is OFDMA, as used first by WiMAX and now LTE. It also allows for reuse 1 deployments, but instead of handling allocation based on time only (GSM), or on time and codes (CDMA), it handles allocations based on frequency and time. The bandwidth is split in many small carriers (15 kHz spacing in LTE for example). Carriers are groups in bunches (a resource block in LTE is 12 carriers for example). And you allocate several RBs to a device for a subframe of 1 ms. Allocation can change each subframe.
What's the gain of OFDMA? Better handling of multipath. When you're cell phone receive the signal from the base station, it actually receives a "main path" and several echoes due to reflexions on buildings, etc. Also, the higher the bandwidth the shortest the elementary symbol duration. At some point, a symbol becomes mixed with echoes from other symbols and decoding becomes a mess. With OFDMA, become each channel is low bandwitdh (15 kHz, compared to 5 MHz for 3G for example) the symbol duration is very long. There's no problem handling with echoes, become the time delay is very small compared to the OFDM symbol duration. The price to pay for this is doing a FFT over the bandwidth to recover all the basic carriers. That's up to 2k FFT. It's doable and practical now thanks to Moore law.
That should give you a quick overview. And to the experts: please forgive the necessary simplifications to fit in a few paragraphs.
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Device terminated MIPv6 is specified, but is unlik
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They're not US, I know, but SaskTel actually supports CDMA, GSM, and another protocol I'd never heard of before. So dropping CDMA support shouldn't be an issue for me.
SaskTel alway has been a leader in technology amongst Canada's phone and cell providers, because their market is small enough that they can deploy the technology to the province without a 5-10 year rollout plan that bigger districts like Ontario, Quebec, or BC require. Manitoba's telephone company breathes hard down SaskTel's neck, though
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Come on, America, at least move onto GSM.
Yeah, AT&T's pages don't mention GSM very much - they keep going on about some "LTE" thing. Hopefully they'll be upgrading from that weird technology to standard GSM some day....
(Yes, I know. The early noughts called, they want their snark about the US mobile phone network back....)
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Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. Now that it's all being ripped out and replaced with 3G there's a lot of GSM hardware on the second-hand market. It's not even expensive.
You do know that the 3G you are referring to is also known as Wideband CDMA or W-CDMA, right?
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:4, Informative)
3G just means 3rd generation. So while W-CDMA is a 3rd generation network technology, it does not mean that all 3rd generation technology is W-CDMA.
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No, it's actually far far far more fragmented than that. It's not anywhere near the GSM market crying and picking up CDMA. Read up, it'll help you. Here's a good start, and you can extend your knowledge into more technical realms once you get the basics down: http://gizmodo.com/5637136/giz-explains-gsm-vs-cdma [gizmodo.com]
Actually, a large part of the problem is that "CDMA" is used as a term to describe two different things:
When people talk about "CDMA" phones, they usually mean it in the second sense, so they don't consider UMTS phones "CDMA" phones, the fact that, when running on a UMTS network, they use
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Better known as UMTS. Never mind that the CDMA in US is CDMA2000. So while UMTS and CDMA2k shares the base layer encoding, the higher layers are very different. Also, CDMA2k is more in line with GSM. For instance, can CDMA2k handle data and voice at the same time? That is a problem it shares with GSM, but that UMTS does not have (originally there for the video call feature, but these days more used for allowing various data services while also handling calls).
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Yes, and it has been supported on Verizon for several months on new phones (SVDO).
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Heh, i stand corrected.
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:5, Interesting)
The one big advantage of GSM is the use of SIM cards, and that simultaneous voice and data were possible. CDMA also has better spectral efficiency than TDMA used by GSM. Check out Wikipedia's [wikipedia.org] article on it and look at the efficiency of the latest CDMA vs GSM standard.
Don't act like the carriers stuck with CDMA to be dinosaurs. It actually was , at least for voice users, the better technology.
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In Verizon and Sprint's business models, their use of CDMA means no SIMs. And at least for now, there aren't any GSM-specific hacks to be worried or annoyed about.
That Verizon doesn't support CDMA-specific hacks only means that they don't get a few carrier signals and the LBS features are somewhat stunted. Fine. Angry Birds doesn't need to know my location, phone list, etc.
SIM cards, in the USA, are not an advantage. In the bad old days, SIM cards held your contacts, and were a pain in the butt-- IN THE USA
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:4, Insightful)
Can someone explain why CDMA inherently forbids SIM cards or an analogous device that lets you move your account over to any old compatible phone without the telecom getting involved?
I'm looking for a technical reason, not "money money money".
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't forbid it, as I recall. It makes it optional and virtually every carrier opted not to as it gives them more control over the handsets.
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I wonder if coverage is more a function of frequency than protocol. the CDMA2k in US use the 450MHz range, right? At least in Scandinavia that was originally used for NMT, and so was unavailable for use with GSM when it first launched. Since then there have been a CDMA2k push on the now available NMT band, but it is only really used for rural (and boat to shore) data connectivity.
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Typically Verizon and att use 850/900/1800/1900 MHz bands. Sprint is the same. T-Mobile uses 850/900/1700AWS/2100 iirc but I may be off on that
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Yeah, US mobile phone companies like Apple, Motorola, RIM, and Palm are just decades behind European mobile phone companies, like Nokia, and... umm...
It's funny how the US takes so much crap for being incompatible, when really, the US is usually the first-mover, and it's the "rest of the world" that decides to develop something intentionally incompatible, for no good reason.
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> and it's the "rest of the world" that decides to develop something intentionally incompatible, for no good reason. Witness ATSC versus DVB.
Rubbish. On both counts.
GSM was in development in the late 1980s, by a range of European telecom companies, and was first deployed in 1991. CDMA was developed by one American company (Qualcomm), and was first deployed in 1995. American network operators picked CDMA partly because it's American, and partly because it was slightly better than GSM in rural areas, where
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ATSC also uses 8-VSB modulation instead of COFDM. 8-VSB has serious problems with multipath, and is damn near impossible to receive in a moving vehicle.
I believe DVB also supports h.264 as a codec, in addition to ATSC'S MPEG-2
The biggest shortcoming of ATSC was its lack of support for 1080p60 with long GOPs. It's not viable for live broadcast, but with offline non-realtime compression, you CAN do 1080p60 in 19.2mbit/sec. Just ask anybody who used to rip DVDs & re-encode them with ridiculously long GOPs
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Motorola was going down the tube until they went all in with Android and manage to land the first Droid phone for Verizon. RIM, as others have pointed out, is Canadian, and seems to have shown up in Europe only in recent years. Palm did so so, but mostly thanks to picking up Handspring and going WinMobile (hello HTC). Only Apple really stands out, but then they basically leveraged their iPod/ITMS silo (and their media attention). Feature wise there was phones already on the market for a number of years that
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CDMA is voice only though, correct? Developers don't hardly touch the voice stuff. Even voice search goes over the data connection these days.
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Tell that to my CDMA 3G phone with unlimited data through Sprint. Specifically the Motorola XPRT, Sprint's version (and pretty much identical to) the Motorola Droid Pro, the best smartphone in existence.
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It's used in the US, where they are 20 years behind the rest of the world in mobile phones.
Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. Now that it's all being ripped out and replaced with 3G there's a lot of GSM hardware on the second-hand market. It's not even expensive.
But CDMA has at least one major advantage: When your phone rings, it does not destroy any recordings being made in the same room (the way a GSM cell phone does).
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I've been using GSM since the 90s in the U.S. Before that, I used TDMA. And yes, I had that Siemens S46, Satan's favorite cell phone to this day.
Why not support CDMA? (Score:2)
Last I looked, it is Sprint & Verizon. AT&T & T-Mobile being GSM.
But this sounds strange - Google is just handing over Verizon's & Sprint's customer bases over to Apple, Microsoft and others? Why not just work w/ Qualcomm, and put in a more restrictive OSS license, and continue to support those devices, rather than abandon a good portion of the market, one of whom is the leader in 4G in the US?
Re:Why not support CDMA? (Score:5, Informative)
Google is just handing over Verizon's & Sprint's customer bases over to Apple, Microsoft and others?
Good Thing you added a question mark because this doesn't mean Google is handing anything over to anyone. Google and Carriers are still more then welcome to use CDMA technology all they like and are free to do anything they want with the phones as long as all the licensing requirements of all the software they use are met. Google removing CDMA from the developer pages is not the same thing as Google saying that the android license and therefor anyone using the android software is now restricted from using CDMA and it can no longer be used because that is not what it means. It means Google is having issues complying with certain licenses by posting the CDMA specs online and therefor they have simply taken it out of the open space where anyone in the world is now able to access it but carriers like Verizon and Sprint and Manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, LG, etc, etc will have no problem obtaining the resources and permissions to develop and implement the CDMA functionality and I'm willing to bet that Google will not only make it easy to load this functionality in a modular way which will ease integration but I also bet that will be aiding with the design and development to these companies to make sure it's done. Don't misinterpret Google taking CDMA from the open developer pages as meaning anything even close to saying Google is not going to allow CDMA on Android phones anymore because one example I can think of already is Sprint, a CDMA provider, has the contract to deploy Galaxy Nexus phones as soon as the exclusivity rights for Verizon finish. People shouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly based on a gross over simplification of what is actually being said without taken a moment to read it thoroughly and make an effort to understand the real implications of the actions. Hope this answers your question.
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Amen. This comment should be the article.
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India has a CDMA network as well.
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And Tata Photon/Photon+ and Reliance data cards have CDMA and GSM variants, but its the CDMA variants that are actually affordable
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:4, Informative)
How widespread is the use of CDMA in the first place?
That depends what you mean. The old 2G GSM is TDMA (time division multiple access), whereas the modern 3G UMTS used in most of the world is CDMA - Code division multiple access.
Fortunately TFA refers to a particular CDMA implementation used in the US (CDMA2000), and not the much more common UMTS version, or CDMA in general.
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It was developed by the same organization, made to be able to hand of to GSM (allowing for a transition period of both networks operating), and likely share some higher level stuff with GSM. But on the radio interface level i am not sure there is much in common.
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UMTS has more in common with CDMA than it does with GSM at the radio level... actually, the most common form of UMTS in use these days is WCDMA, which is being used basically everywhere (though on different frequencies in different parts of the world), and is for all intents and purposes the same as CDMA at the radio level except that it uses 5MHz bands instead of 1.25MHz bands. (there's a few other differences, but that's the big one)
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And for USB data cards
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CDMA had better coverage in Australia outside of metropolitan areas, and when it was turned off to free up spectrum for the 3G network it was a big step backwards for a lot of people. Either the situation has improved since then or the affected population has given up complaining about it. I'm pretty sure the last CDMA cell was turned off here a while back.
I'm always confused when people talk about GSM though, as i've heard 3G referred to as a GSM protocol but 3G is just an evolution of CDMA... I guess we'r
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And wasn't CDMA a step backwards from AMPS, which was turned off in 2000? Apparently.
The "3G" UMTS (and even 4G like LTE) networks use W-CDMA on the air interface, but talk GSM protocols. The CDMA ideas were much superior than TDMA as used by GSM, at a cost of more CPU computations required.
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And wasn't CDMA a step backwards from AMPS, which was turned off in 2000? Apparently.
GSM was a huge step backwards from AMPS in terms of coverage once you got out of the city, and the analogue network was kept on much longer for this reason. It's stretching my memory a bit but I think CDMA was introduced after that to fill the gap, and so was perceived as a step forward from GSM, even though it wasn't as good as AMPS.
Re:For us non-US folk... (Score:5, Insightful)
GSM has a fixed maximum cell size - 20km radius at first, later extended to 35km. CDMA doesn't have a maximum. GSM does because it uses time division multiplexing - several phones can transmit and receive on the same frequency, and they take turns. The further from the tower your phone is, the longer the signal takes to travel back and forth, and there comes a point where your transmissions spill into the next slot, reducing call quality for whoever's using it. If you get to that distance from the tower, it will just drop the call. The maximum cell size is a tradeoff between how much equipment the network needs to serve a given area and how much spectrum it would have to use.
In densely-populated places like most of Europe, the maximum cell size isn't really an issue - there aren't many places where you can leave one settlement and travel 20km without entering another. Australia and North America, on the other hand, are much more spread out, and the number of GSM cells that would be needed to provide acceptable coverage to rural areas would be too expensive for the likely revenue from them.
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What a crock of shit. Stop making excuses for the tightwad US telcos that refuse to invest in infrastructure.
You can't get any more spread out than Saskatchewan with 1,000,000-odd people (and we are odd!) in a province this size, yet 98% of our province is covered by SaskTel's GSM network, and was covered in under 5 years once they decided to upgrade from the old analogue cell systems they used to have.
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Contrast this with, say, Eastern KY with a population density of 14 people/mile^2 (county dependent) that is more uniformly distributed. CDMA coverage is sketchy, and GSM is a bad joke. The maximum range of the signal is what makes it economical t
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You're making excuses: http://dslprime.com/a-wireless-cloud/61-w/4466-us-wireless-75-fewer-basestations-than-comparable-europe [dslprime.com]
You have no comprehension of how badly US telcos underinvest in their networks. In 2007 AT&T was building less towers than T-Mobile while ignoring their engineers' warnings about the network meltdown their actions would cause.
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"How widespread is the use of CDMA in the first place?"
60%+ of US subs are CDMA.
The inferior GSM is used by crApTT, TnoMobile and a few regional nobodies.
"Come on, America, at least move onto GSM. "
GSM is DEAD, and has been surpassed by UMTS and I've got news for you.
UMTS uses.... wait for it... WCDMA!
HA! So hate elsewhere dude.
LTE is closely related to GSM & UMTS as it uses the existing backend systems for GSM/UMTS, and there is an easy upgrade path for CDMA carriers for the backends, but LTE is OFDMA
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So CDMA2000 is going to take the glory for the use of WCDMA as base for UMTS? If someone wins an olympic medal, I am sure the winner's brother cannot claim he won...
GSM is only dead as far as 2G is dead; 90% of the world use GSM for 2G. The U.S. "consultants" were laughed at when they wanted to establish CDMA2000 as the Iraqi mobile network after the takeover...
Re:good (Score:5, Interesting)
The GSM standards as originally developed were deliberately chosen to work on bands (900 MHz , IIRC) that in the US were assigned to the military. That is, to be initially incompatible and unusable in the US, so as to split the world into "US" and "rest", and give non-US developers a head start. It worked ...
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I seriously doubt it was done with the intention of locking US providers out of the GSM market. Besides, I can't think of any reason you couldn't run GSM technology on different frequency spectrums, and I know for a FACT that many nations do so. You just need to have custom hardware built for the market, and that would cost FAR less than supporting entirely different CDMA hardware to cater to big US telcos that are too tight-fisted to invest in their infrastructure but prefer to let customers put up with
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I don't know about that. From a signal encoding and processing point of view, I've always seen CDMA mobile protocols superior over GSM protocols. The only major drawback I've seen to CDMA, and it's not a little one, is its lack of resilience when large group of people get together (events, shows, stadiums, etc.). The MTSO becomes quickly overloaded and instead of quality degradation, you start to have full service loss.
I'm sure there are many reason while in the end GSM is better and more widely implemented
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So pitch GSM, now.
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Maybe it is the details of the licensing that differ between CDMA and GSM. The devil uses details as hiding places, ya know. I suspect Google hates having the OS tainted with having to handle proprietary stuff.
I'd rather have a fully open platform. However, I can accept a platform with well isolated sections where things like firmware to drive parts like the RF section do not need to involve the primary smart apps section where open innovation needs to play. But this does mean the proprietary sections n
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That's what I'm wondering. I'm a Boost Mobile user. They were a subsidary of Nextel, but because the iDEN network was so horrible, Boost has been offering CDMA devices for several years now.
I've had several Boost Mobile CDMA devices now, including an Android that I'm using now. I wonder what that means for the future of Sprint and Boost Android users. If Google took it out of the Android code, does that just mean that the Sprint devs have to put it back in on their own?