Gość: super__maruda
IP: *.ci.seattle.wa.us
07.10.02, 23:36
As I think many of my readers know, I used to work for Qualcomm designing
cell phones. Qualcomm is the company which invented CDMA, and made it
practical, and made it into a market success, and it now dominates the
American market, where Verizon and Sprint both use it. There are two other
nationwide cellular systems: AT&T currently uses IS-136 TDMA, which is
obsolete and has no upgrade path. Cingular uses GSM, a more sophisticated
form of TDMA from Europe.
In Europe, various governments decided that they (the Europeans) had designed
the ultimate digital cellular system, and they passed laws making it illegal
to deploy anything except GSM, whose primary supporters/suppliers were Nokia,
Ericsson, Siemens and Alcatel.
Meanwhile, the FCC decided that it would not mandate any industry standard.
It granted licenses for spectrum but permitted the licensee to choose
whatever equipment and standard it wanted. (Within limits. There were certain
certification standards required by the FCC to guarantee safety and to avoid
interference between neighboring systems.)
And all through the 90's, me and everyone else in the US cell phone industry
put up with constant ragging from Europeans about the evident virtues of GSM
and the equally evident virtues of a government mandated standard. While in
the US you had what seemed at the time to be utter chaos, with a huge number
of small companies using a bewildering array of different standards, in
Europe anyone could carry their phone almost anywhere in the continent, and
if they couldn't use it they could move their personality module into a local
phone and use that.
Of course, that apparent chaos in the US was only a temporary phenomenon, and
I think maybe the FCC and the rest of the government knew it would be.
There's always shakeout, but in the meantime this kind of government policy
of keeping hands off meant that the industry was given broad ability to
experiment. And within that environment, early in the 1990's, the founders of
my former employer Qualcomm began to work on a radically different way to
handle cell phones called Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA. It's
radical in many, many ways but by far the most obvious is that all the phones
in the system and all the cells in the system operate simultaneously on the
same carrier frequency. They don't "take turns" because they don't need to.
In fact, CDMA was so revolutionary that when it was first discussed, many
thought it couldn't be made to work. Indeed, at least one European company
deeply involved with GSM, Ericsson, went through the three classic stages of
Not Invented Here syndrome:
1. It's impossible. 2. It's infeasible. 3. Actually, we thought of it first.
wiecej:
www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/764695/posts
