CDMA vs GSM Debate by Development group

CDMA2000 VS WCDMA,
Depends on How Many Carriers
will support Which Technology.
(or is it CDG Vs 3G AMERICA)

 

Both technologies have their strengths, however I personally believe CDMA based technology gets the edge especially when we look long term into 3G. The article listed a couple of the strenghts that make CDMA the better choice especially when it comes to 3G and the cost effectiveness. Not naming names (Cingular) is upgrading their GSM network to UMTS which is requiring a lot more investment, equipment and engineering than CDMA IS-95 operators going to CDMA2000 1x-EVDO ever did.

Do I believe CDMA will ever overtake GSM...no. Reason being is so many populated countries started out with GSM there is no way they will be converting to CDMA at this point. The billions this would cost GSM providers are the sole reason CDMA does not enter the conversation. So by default, GSM is kind of the winner.

GSM...Its like the old home you keep sticking money into....it may have been better to just buy new!! :wink:

 

Reading CDG Press Release
these 39 GSM Operators have plans
to Deploy CDMA2000
and is Not Confirmed.

 

The path to CDMA2000 is less costly to those operators who already have CDMA networks established. But for a GSM operator it is far more costly to move from GSM to CDMA2000 than to go to UMTS. So it makes more sense to move to UMTS for them.

As for end-user performance, I see UMTS with HSDPA having more of a technological future because it is a nascent technology, so it has more room for upgrades than CDMA2000, especially when you take into consideration that UMTS uses a wider channel.

HSDPA still has 4 upgrades from the current 1.8mbps: 3.6mbps, 7.2mbps, and 14.4mbps, plus HSUPA.

CDMA2000 has rev. A, and rev. B coming. There was also EV-DV which was killed before being born. So that leaves two upgrades from the current rev. 0, unless we count CDMA2000 3X as a 3rd upgrade but I've read that will never be deployed in the US. So are there any more CDMA2000 upgrades I am not aware of? Maybe rev. C?

 

Keep in mind those speeds promised by HSDPA are MIR only, not CIR. Same thing goes with EVDO and its REV's....In other words those speeds will probably never be reached by Joe Customer. My EVDO card which is supposed to get approx 768K usually gets around 500-600 K of throughput....but I'm not complaining.

 

Still better than the alternatives.

 

i Don't think these Wireless Carrier will
ever Match my CATV Carrier Speed
Download = 10 MBs
Upload = 1.9 MBs
All for $35/month

And for an Additional $10/month
Download = 20 MBs
Upload = 5 MBs

 

T-Mobile UK is apparently planning a 20 Mbps download rate by the end of the decade.

 

Can you take that speed with you on the road?

 

This is the 'Too much invested to quit' way of thing. Governments and corporations are very good at it. The military uses it a lot with older ships and aircraft. I think I saw a 'Fleecing of America' on this a while back. But you never know, Europe converted all their currency to the Euro. When GSM becomes too far out of date and anybody given a choice knows to go with the alternative technology, I could eventually see a change.

 

When it comes to 3G I think this is spot on! Simply put the networks have invested too much in 3G to allow it to fail, they have to make it work. To be fair though, the tales of 3G's demise are somewhat exaggerated I think. Whilst 3G may not have gone to plan e.g. video calling proving less popular than expect, I think other services may promote greater 3G usage e.g. music downloads.

It's this situation that makes me somewhat skeptical over 4G. The networks are probably going to be more cautious when thinking about replacing their 3G networks.

Not all of Europe.

 

That's correct. But the point is, they are not far from reality. My 1.8mbps card maxes out at about 1.4mbps, so I would expect that if whenever 14.4mbps is deployed, we will probably see real speeds around 10mbps.

 

lol Good point, so it wasn't a perfect analogy!

And I meant to put 'way of thinking' instead of 'way of thing' in my earlier post. It doesn't make as much sense with that typo.

 

Note my emphasis.

After all the hype that never came to fruition, please excuse me if I do not accept plans as reality.

 

I think you are probably wise to treat such announcements with a degree of skepticism. However, one imagines that in making such an announcement they must at least think it is possible.

The thing is of course, how fast do you need your connection to be? If one is simply using one's handset to conenct to the web then one is probably not going to be doing anything terribly data intensive, and as such probably won't need anywhere near 20 Mbits. On the other hand one may wish to use one's handset as a modem, and perhaps a fast download rate would be advantageous.

 

Regardless of how high the wireless speed is, there will be bandwidth issue from the tower to the to the internet. There will always be bottlenecks somewhere.

 

Quite possibly. Interestingly enough I heard that one of the networks (which one escapes me at the moment), is planning to try and get customers to use their handsets for home broadband. One imagines this wouldn't be until HSDPA/HSUPA has been implemented.

 

To me the GSM vs CDMA debate was over when the worlds GSM operators chose the CDMA air interface for their upgrade to 3G. Before anybody starts flaming.....W-CDMA/UMTS/HSDPA all use a CDMA air interface. Not the TDMA air interface like GSM. Of this there is no doubt or question. A much less efficient form of CDMA, but still CDMA none the less. So when somebody says "GSM covers more of the world, so it must be better". Ponder this for a moment.....since the most of the worlds GSM operators are upgrading their GSM networks with CDMA air interface based UMTS/W-CDMA/HSDPA for their 3G networks. Wouldn't this appear to suggest that CDMA will cover almost (if not) every where GSM covers... PLUS the existing and future CDMA footprint?

 

I think the most important thing about this whole debate is that the vast majority of people do not care. Most people want a system that works, they probably could care less whether it is GSM, CDMA, UMTS or any other abbreviation one cares to mention. If it allows them to do what they want to do at ana ffordable price then they will most likely be happy with it.

I've said this before, but it fascinates me how the GSM vs CDMA debate seems to be very much a North American thing. I can't think of anyone I know of from other parts of the world who even bothers with this matter.

 

I think it may seem strange because your area already has an accepted standard. That and us Americans like to argue about these kind of things .

 

I understand that there are unified standards here, but even if we leave that aside for a moment, the intensity of the debate seems to be rather curious. I say that because the chances are that most people don't care what standard they use, infact most people probably don't know which standard they are using, as long as it works. It does seem a rather odd thing for some people to get worked up about, a wireless communication standard.

 

The debate is because we do have more than one standard, and therefore a choice. Which gives people the option of preferring one standard over the other. And with any choices some "feel" their choice is the best, not only for themselves but everyone else also. Which is why these debates sometimes get a little out of hand. As far as the "infact most people probably don't know which standard they are using, as long as it works" comment, that is true to some extent. I would have to say that the majority do know which standard their cellular phone operates on. This in no way implies they understand the differences between the standards, or the advantages/disadvantages of each. In the end it's having the choice that counts the most. And causes these debates.

 

I take the point that some people may very well be aware of the standard they are using in terms of the abbreviation e.g. if asked they could say thy are using CDMA. However, I wonder whether most people could tell you what that actually means, and I'm not talking about what the letters stand for. Do most people really know what the difference between CDMA and GSM is, for example?

I have to pick up on your point about choice. It seems to me that the choice of standards in the U.S. is more a case of choice for the sake of choice rather than it being a valid choice that actually benefits the market. I'm sure the different standards probably do benefit the market on some level, but as I see it they do more harm to the American mobile market than they do good.

 

But the comeback to that, of course, is where would GSM be right now without CDMA/Qualcomm? Probably still languishing with GPRS and *maybe* EDGE. I agree that the US market probably suffered initially with having too much choice and not enough coverage, but long term it was a good thing. If nothing else it pushed GSM to increase data speeds. Even if CDMA never gains another dollar of market share against GSM, I at least hope it sticks around for competition's sake. A little competition keeps everyone honest.

 

There are a couple of points here:

First of all I don't think it is necessarily appropiate to compare different markets in direct terms. Different markets will have unique properties that serve to heighten or diminish both generally negative and positive factors. For example, one could claim that a combination of a relatively small market and different standards might hinder the Japanese market, but one could argue that such negative factors are negated to an extent by the consumer culture of Japan.

The second point is that whilst some countries may indeed offer more than one standard, that is not to say that those countries do not have disparity between them. Poland, for example, has both CDMA and GSM I believe, but as far as I am aware the CDMA presence there is negligible. From what I remember Brazil seems to have been moving further towards GSM of late. From the figures I obtained for Russia there are 142.31 million GSM subscribers out of a total population of 142.4 million. I'm not entirely sure how accurate the subscriber number figures are because that seems to be an awfuly high number of subscribers, and I didn't think Russia had that high a level of penetration. Of course that number could be partly due to multiple accounts of course.

The U.S. has a great deal less disparity between the two main standards used, with both having roughly similar numbers of subscribers.

The thing is, if you remove the technological distinctions between networks they then have to compete on other terms e.g. price, coverage, handsets, etc. If all the networks are using the same technology they have to then start focusing on actually making their service the best because each of their competitors has access to the same technology they do.

Choice is a great thing, but as I said before not when it is simply choice for the sake of choice. I'm not saying that different standards are entirely to blame for every problem in the North American mobile market, but at best different standards don't seem to be foing much to help the American mobile market.

For instance, America has no global networks in the mould of Vodafone, Telefonica Moviles, etc, which rather surprises me given that American companies are often at the forefront of many fields. In fact one American networks is owned by one European network whilst another is partly owned by another European network. America has a relatively low mobile penetration rate for a First World country. America is not at the forefront of hardware and service adoption. America has only one major handset manufacturer, again a surprising statistic given America's lead position in many technological fields.

As I said, I am not suggesting that all of things are a direct result of using different standards, but certainly those competing standards don't seem to be doing much in the way of advancing the state of play.

 

I'm afraid I have to disagree. In the UK the networks all used the same standard, GSM, and yet the UK had a live 3G network operational before the U.S. I believe. Even if we leave that aside for a moment there is still the question of why the UK networks, or European networks in general, should bother introducing 3G at all if they were all using the same standards since there would be little or no incentive to do so based upon your model.

The reason European networks adopted faster networks is because the market here is arguably the hardest in the world, in which to compete. The UK networks had already signed up just about everyone who could have a mobile phone, there was no room left for organic expansion. The only way to keep growing was to retain customers whilst poaching new ones from their competitors. To do that the networks seek to offer ever better handsets, deals, services, etc.

3G was very much a network driven idea rather than a consumer driven idea. The networks wanted new revenue models, and they needed more advanced technology to do so, hence 3G.

In the U.S. 3g has been implemented because basically everyone else was doing it. The technology each network uses is irrelevant because they would each need to implement 3G anyway to stop their competitors from gaining an advantage over them. The U.S. could be entirely CDMA or GSM and they would still have implemented 3G because if one does it they all have to.

An interesting question to pose is why competing standards haven't seen 3G introduced earlier and more rapidly in the U.S. if they are indeed a more efficient catalyst for the adoption of new technology? The answer, in my opinion, is simple, they aren't a more efficient catalyst. Even now, after 3G has been implemented the U.S. lags behind other 3G nations, not just in terms of coverage, which it will obviously have trouble with owing to the geographic and demographic makeup of the U.S., but in terms of handsets, services, etc. I'm not trying to nitpick old bean, but I just don't see the evidence to suggest that competing standards are doing anything that a single standard couldn't accomplish.

 

There actually is an EVDO rev. C coming...it was posted on the forum just a little while ago:

http://forums.wirelessadvisor.com/wireless-network-technologies/59427-cdma-ev-do-rev-c-called.html

~Andy

 

Don't forget that WiMax is backwards compatible with all IS-95 based standards. This is one reason Sprint Nextel chose WiMax for it's next generation network. EVDO rev C/UMB is very comparable to WiMax's capabilities. But I don't think Sprint Nextel (for one) will implement it though. They will most likely go straight to IMS from WiMax. VZW would be my guess for upgrading to UMB.