What is the best form of service CDMA,TDMA,GSM or iDEN

The widest deployed technology is GSM. It is not the most secure. As has been documented, GSM is nothing more than TDMA with added security. The most advanced technology is CDMA. Posters have mentioned warble and echo with CDMA.

If your intellectual &quot;discussion&quot; (debate) is over technology, CDMA wins hands down. (Why else would all the vendors be migrating to it?) If the discussion is over user-perceived reception and call quality, that vein is so subjective, no one will ever win. My experience is that with <u>all</u> the technologies (I have used all except iDEN), the call quality is clear as long as the network is available and not overloaded.

To the common user of wireless, that is the bottom line--clear calls, minimal dropped calls.

Have fun with the debate, though. I've engaged on-line discussions about this and never noticed a winner.

Addendum: Just found this article about CDMA. Its a year old, but good nevertheless.

 

I think that the 2 best standars are GSM and CDMA, i noticed that in both standars the backgroung noice is minimal compared to Tdma. Cdma it`s better for data but when i had my verizon phone i noticed that the system was inconsistant, sometimes i had full service and sometimes i had 1 bar an the same place and sometimes i had better reception inside my house than outside. just remember that in the next 2 to 3 yrs there will be more Gsm users than Cdma users in the world by a lot. Remember not always the best technology wins (Beta vs Vhs and Cd`s vs mini discs). And Iden it`s just a single band Tdma phone with a 2-way radio on it, when i started to sell nextel in 1998 i took a training and they were saying that they use Tdma and a year later later they change the name to Iden..

 

&quot; ... in the next 2 to 3 yrs there will be more Gsm users than Cdma users in the world by a lot&quot;

I'm not sure what you're talking about. GSM is the most widely used in the world, not CDMA. It's not even close as the the number of GSM users are way way ahead of the number CDMA users.

GSM has been great because of the economies of scale available for cell phone companies. GSM carriers offered some of the latest and greatest phones featuring transferable SIM cards and such. But GSM is not a packet-switched technology but a circuit-switched based technology and therefore it's not so suitable for data transfers.

GSM uses a combination of frequency division and time division (very much similar to TDMA) whereas CDMA uses a combination of frequency division and code division for providing multi-user communication access. The capacity of CDMA is supposedly much higher than that of GSM/TDMA system. Now, the signal broadcasting technique of CDMA uses a &quot;spread sprectrum&quot; technique...meaning the (encoded) signal is broadcasted by being &quot;spread out&quot; over the entire bandwidth. CDMA offers better sound quality, higher capacity and better privacy of coded digital signals.

Why hasn't CDMA worked out to be better than GSM? Implementation is the key...we're talking about the infrastructure and cell site distribution and capacity handling. There are many pieces of the puzzle that need to be put together. Likewise, in the computerworld TCP/IP is not the most efficient protocol but has spawned enormously to where it's now the de facto world-wide standard.

But listen to this -- CDMA is a form of narrow-band spread sprectrum. Well, GSM carriers will be upgrading to WCDMA (Wideband-CDMA)!!! This is basically a form of CDMA utilizing a wide-band spread sprectrum.

So to answer your question...everything points to CDMA as the superior technology and again keep in mind that GSM carriers (including Cingular and AT&amp;T who are migrating to GSM) will be upgrading to Wideband-CDMA.

 

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<< Me and my fellow co workers have gotten on to the debate on what is the best technology today and i finally want to put it to a rest i happen to lean more towards GSM service. I find them to be the easiest to replace and work well with very few dropped calls i just want to see what everyone else has in mind. I happen to see that they all have there strong points except if someone mentions iden just because of the direct connect that is poor reasoning. Rate them 1-4
1.GSM
2.CDMA
3.TDMA
4.IDEN