CDMA vs. GSM in Post-war Iraq

An anonymous reader submits: "Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is pressing congress to favor CDMA over GSM for mobile phone service in U.S.-funded reconstruction plans. One reason for pushing this is that a CDMA system would benefit American companies, such as California-based Qualcomm, while GSM would favor European companies. Currently, GSM is the most widely used mobile standard in surrounding countries."

this was my much better submission...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit, I spent a half hour on this. Oh well, here goes:

According to an article [theregister.co.uk] in The Register, Congressman Darrell Issa (R, CA) [house.gov] is pushing hard for CDMA to be the cell network of choice for Iraq. Why? Because GSM(Groupe Speciale Mobile) is French, and he claims that the only source of GSM equipment would be French/German companies(except for, say, Lucent [lucent.com], Motorola [motorola.com], and Nortel [nortelnetworks.com])...and we all know how popular the French are [cleveland.com]. Putting aside concerns about winning the war first and having your priorities in order(such as getting food there, before worrying about aide workers having Enhanced 911), Issa claims(incorrectly [google.com]) that only CDMA offers GPS integration for E911. I'm sure the large campaign contribution by Qualcomm to Issa [opensecrets.org] has absolutely nothing to do with the bill [loc.gov]. Talk about people who need to be introduced to a cluebat [userfriendly.org].

Uhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

There's already that sort of aid on the way, and Bush wants another 8 billion or so to be spent on that in the first 6 months. That's not counting other private group charities. They have to look at all these different issues as part of rebuilding. It's like saying we shouldn't bother fighting the common cold until we've got cancer taken care of.

Re:Isn't this a bit premature (and U.S.-Centric)?

[PukkaStoryTeller]

Well, how can it not be U.S. centered when the U.S. is doing the job? The reconstruction is going to require a gargantuan amount of resources and military stuff. There are still soldiers in Japan and so forth. Anyway, this same sort of thing is happening with oil pipelines in Iraq. The company that was chosen is the one who's former CEO is VP Cheney. However, PLEASE don't jump to conclusions about that coincidence (And we all know people will). The company is probably one of the best at laying oil pipelines and what not, in addition to the fact that it is US based. So when it comes down to something like wireless mobile phones, whatever benefits the US economically will be very beneficial. I guess. I hope I was clear on that one. It's hard to say.

Re:In other news

[Milican]

"He is still on Haliburton's payroll and still owns 8 million of Haliburton's stock options."

I'm sorry, but thats incorrect. The quote below with source proves it....

"Cheney divested himself of all interest in Halliburton, the largest U.S. oilfield services company, after the 2000 election." CNN Money [cnn.com]

Hope that helps clear things up :)

JOhn

In sparsely pop'd Oz CDMA goes a longer -distance-

[ivi]

If you leave the last big town, to go bush
in Australia, you might as well leave your
GSM handset behind, in favor of a CDMA unit.

Cheaper than sta.phones, the CDMA had greater
range (over flat terrain) & about the same
air-time costs as GSM, here...

So, that's the terrain of Iraq like, then?

View from a country with both networks

[ukoda]

Here in New Zealand we have both networks. I do development of communications products using both systems. As I see it, for the end users, CDMA really only has an advantage if you need faster data. The other 99% of the users would be better off with GSM. CDMA proponents will give plenty of sound technical reasons why CDMA is better and they are right but from a practical point of view GSM wins almost every time. Some of the reasons for GSM are:
1. Don't have pay the Qualcomm fees so the pones are cheaper.
2. Sim cards allow the user to choose where and when to get their phone from instead of having to get permission to change from their telco.
3. There is generally a larger range of phones (see 2.), although some GSM telcos control network access, ours doesn't. The local CDMA phones are just plain ugly !
4. Roaming is better, my phone works in almost any country including the US, and you can count the number of countries a CDMA user can roam to with one hand.
On a political note I have to say this isn't a good look for country claiming to be there to help the local, not themself...

Re:This is a joke right?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Seriously folks, in percentage of population, the US Military has already killed more Iraqi civilians than 9/11 killed Americans.

The obvious response to this is: so what? Percentage of the population? That's a pretty meaningless metric.

However, it's worth noting that you're actually correct... or may be, depending on how the numbers turn out.

September 11 killed about 3,000 Americans, out of a population of about 280 million. (All figures are rounded, of course, because I'm just too lazy to look them up for an argument as ridiculous as this one.) That's 0.0011%.

The Iraqi government claims that about 350 civilians have died during the war. Of course, they claim to have destroyed dozens of our tanks, too, so we know their claims are far from perfect. But let's go with the Iraqi number, just for kicks. There are about 25 million people in Iraq. That comes to 0.0014%. So by those numbers, you're right.

However, we only have confirmation of about 25 civilian deaths in Iraq. That's going to be too low, obviously, because we don't have confirmation of every single civilian death, but just to put a bracket around the numbers, that comes to exactly 0.0001%.

So whether or not there have been more Iraqi civilians killed as a percentage of total population than were killed on 9/11 remains to be seen; the percentages could be quite close, or they could be off by a factor of 10, depending on how the final math turns out.

But this is all just an exercise in arithmetic. It means nothing. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, so we're not there to exercise vengance. And if we were, we would still have a long way to go, because Iraq would still be 2,650 civilians short of the mark.

Let's not worry about what cell phones the Iraqis will use after we win, and worry instead about whether or not it's possible for us to win.

Nobody has the slightest doubt that we'll win. This has been, by some interpretations, the most successful military campaign in history, and that includes the ratio of civilians killed per ton of ordinance employed. In other words, this has been the most benign war in history so far, and yet we're still virtually unopposed. Our biggest concern right now, apart from avoiding civilian casualties, is harassment from irregulars behind our front lines. The biggest campaign of resistance the Iraqi forces can mount against us right now qualifies as a nuisance, and not even a significant nuisance.

There's no question that we're going to win.

Another example: Halliburton

[NOLAChief]

Anyone else notice that Halliburton (formerly helmed by Dick Cheney) got a nice contract [forbes.com] to put out the oil wells that have been set on fire? Another coincidence?

Re:My thoughts

[KITT_KATT!*]

> Can CDMA and GSM phones exist in the same area?

Yes, of course. Most mobile networks in Australia are GSM but we also have CDMA because it's better in rural areas.

And yes, someone on a GSM phone can talk to someone on a CDMA phone and vice versa, just like someone on a mobile can talk to someone on a land line.

Seriously though, everything I've ever heard about American mobile phone networks seems really weird and backwards. I hear for example that the numbers are indistinguisable from land line numbers so the caller doesn't know they're calling a mobile and that consequently the recipient of the call pays for it. Elsewhere in the world the number is noticeably different and the caller pays. So I would personally be against the Americans setting up the mobile phone network in Iraq at all, whether it's GSM or CDMA! (On the other hand you guys are better at broadband so I'll let you take care of the cable roll out!) (Very magnanimous, I know! ;-))

But yes, it seems a little trivial when we're still at war and people are dying.

One question to ask would be: What was used in the reconstruction in Afghanistan?

Re:This is a joke right?

[Evil Adrian]

Actually, no, no it isn't.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A522 41-2002Dec29.html [washingtonpost.com]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/88244_sean24 .shtml [nwsource.com]

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/iraq gate/iraqgate.html [gwu.edu]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 003/03/02/IN123519.DTL [sfgate.com]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/01/17/iraq.chemical.su it/ [cnn.com]

Defend your viewpoint, ass!

Re:this was my much better submission...

[ceranta]

Excellent points here.

Issa's obviously tied to Qualcomm in many ways, I'm sure he's a long standing shareholder as well as an accepter of donations from said company.

Issa's reasoning is outrageous and only adds fuel to a very rediculous fire (US vs. France, Germany). GSM is not owned by any company, it is a standard adopted by many countries around the world (including the US) and the US has A LOT to gain if there is such a plan to (re)build a mobile network from the companies listed - Nortel, Lucent, Motorola, etc.

Sure, there is a vested interest in the GSM network from a European/Middle East standpoint due to roaming reasons. Why build a network based on a technology that will only allow the Iraqi people the ability to use mobile phones within their country alone. I'm sure there are many who would like to roam outside the country to visit others that have only GSM based networks.

Issa's comments are invalid, biased and horribly incorrect. He should understand what he's talking about before spewing out such crap.

Re:Bull...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

No, we're not getting food into Iraq because the priority for this war is the Oil.

Yes, that's right. It's all about oil. We want the oil, must have the oil. Got to have the oil.

Let me ask you a question, though. This war, including the postwar reconstruction, is probably going to cost us around 200 billion dollars, and that doesn't count the cost of the munitions we're using. We've used over a billion and a half dollars' worth of cruise missiles alone so far, and the war's only a week old. Two hundred billion dollars plus would have bought us practically all the Iraqi oil we could have hauled off. Why didn't we just buy it, and save everybody a lot of time, money, and trouble?

Why didn't the Coalition PLAN for the mines?

We did. That's why we thought to bring mine detection equipment-- not to mention a platoon of highly motivated bottlenose dolphins and sea lions-- to the party.

Second, Kuwait is right next door. Why can't we just land in Kuwait and deliver the food that way.

We are. Read the article.

Re:Well, too bad for them

[austus]

The fact that people are such twits to actually think a damn blow job is a big deal while the patriot act is just swell demonstrates the perverse sense of morality my fellow Americans have. I take that back. They're scared little blood thirsty fascist sheep.

Go ahead, call me a traitor. From traitors, that is a complement. Good thing the constitution transcends the toilet paper this administration thinks it is. There's going to be hell to pay when the brainwashing wears off. I think that shall be soon since there are already cries for Blair's head. When American death toll in this very *avoidable* war exceeds 1000, Bush may join blair at the Hague trial.

Re:Talk about counting chickens

[be-fan]

To back this up: some statistics

Percentage of budget of US foreign aid: 1.0% (dead last among western nations).
Percentage of that dedicated to military aid to allies: ~50%
Percentage of total aid that comes directly back to US companies: ~70%
Percentage of people polled that think we spend too much on foreign aid: 75%
Average response to the question, "how much should we spend on foreign aid?": 8.4%

Re:This is a joke right?

[1029]

Why this got moderated up who knows... OT is what I'd have given it. But to reply:

While undoubtedly civilians will die in a war, there are two points to be made here:

1) You'd be a fool to think all those deaths were by US bombs alone. Sadam has been known to blame his own military mishaps (perhaps even bomb his own people if they get in his way) on the US. To put it in another point of view: it would be like the US calling a friendly fire incident an Iraqi attack. The point being those numbers are suspect. Sadam kills thousands of people every week (every day?) that he does not like, so where is the relation between these new deaths and 9/11? These could easily be a continuation of Saddams own murder-spree.

2) Only time will tell if Iraq is truly liberated at the end of this offensive, but suffice it to say the intent is there. Whereas the 9/11 attacks were in no way aimed at helping Americans break free of a murderous, genocidal, oppresive regime.

Compare apples to appales, I say.

Next time you're watching the bombs explode on CNN, remember how you felt on 9/11, and realize that the same thing is happening in Iraq, right now.

And has been for upwards of 10 years now. This reminds me of a saying I saw, though I cannot remember where now: "Do dead Iraqis only count if they are killed by the US?"

I felt devestated to see such a loss of life on 9/11. I do not like seeing peaceful citizens of Iraq being killed now. All the more reason to be taking care of things now so that the people of Iraq no longer have to put up with being killed en-masse by a dictator.

- Get in, give democracy, get out.

we've been shafted already

[wadiwood]

What's best for Iraq? or What's best for Bush's friends?

USA is not the only ones "paying" for this and yet there are no open tenders, even within the USA economy, stuff is going directly to the republican cronies of GW Bush.

Eg Cheney's company Halliburton [abc.net.au] has the oil well capping project already, nobody else got a look in.

Surely if the USA people are paying for this (which I dispute that they are the only contributors), then shouldn't they be getting the best value for money available - which usually means some form of tender process, even if evaluation is fast tracked. This stuff shouldn't be automatically awarded to Bush's mates.

So what the hell happened to the "best interests of Afghanistan" after they were "liberated"?

USA global domination manifesto [newamericancentury.org] These people want to stop anyone anywhere from acting against their interest. So the only interests allowed will be their own. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Presently the rest of us who are not "against the USA" will be paying tribute taxes just to be left alone.

War Body Count < Pre-War Body Count

[superyooser]

Why did they start the body count at 0 when the war began? Oh right, no Iraqi civilians were killed before the war. Our war has disrupted the peace that Iraqis were enjoying. Seriously, the only kind of "peace" the people of Iraq had was RIPping with the worms and maggots in the ground.

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me

they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. [upi.com] He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."

We all knew that there would be civilian deaths in Iraq, but you should compare the ongoing war body count and post-war body count to the pre-war body count. Saddam Hussein is responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand people, or over a million by some estimates. He was killing hundreds of people every week. If only 200-300 were killed in a week of war, that's probably approximately maintaining the status quo -- the pre-war body count -- minus the torture. The post-war body count will be close to zero per week.

Re:CDMA rocks! - Some enlightenment.

[Anonymous Coward]

CDMA-the-signaling-scheme rocks, yes. In fact, it rocks so hard that *all* 3G systems use it in one form or another.

That includes 3G GSM systems- which result in royalty payments to Qualcomm- and China's new standard, which attempts to avoid paying same.

Confused? "GSM" is a standard for creating cellphone networks (think the top layers of the OSI stack). Old GSM networks used a link-layer/physical-layer scheme called TDMA, which kinda sucks compared to CDMA, in the sense that CDMA can cram many more bits into the same volume of aether. (Whether you use those bits for more voice calls- dig up oldschool GSM's max-callers-per-cell sometime, and you'll see it's ludicrously small for urban areas- or for high speed data is up to you.)

Now, Qualcomm, being the original CDMA pimps, have their own proprietary network standards, which, when implemented, generally leave out the features people do like about GSM- "features" being SIM cards, a useful aspect of telecoms regulation in Europe. They call these standards things like "CDMA2000" and "CDMA1X," hence the confusion.

So, I just ask that everyone realize how many independent variables exist:

0. Spectrum allocation - How many 'slots' will be reserved for competing telecom providers, if any?

1. Modulation (physical/link-layer techniques) - as noted, these mostly boil down to flavors of CDMA, if current-model hardware is used. An old TDMA network could probably be built entirely out of cheap surplus hardware, of course.

2. Network standard - How your cells coordinate with eachother; how your phones authenticate to your cells; etc etc etc. Basically, "stuff that goes in software." This is where the "CDMA vs. GSM" debate lies... but then we have:

3. Regulation/deregulation - GSM was raised in an environment regulating competition, meaning that a lot of thought has been given to allowing a choice of provider. In America, we never mandated a physical/link-layer standard, thus allowing Omnipoint to show up with GSM, Sprint with CDMA, and Verizon with their tri?-mode analog/TDMA/CDMA? network. As such, it's now technologically "impossible" (read: difficult; you'd need tri-mode multiband phones, *and* a shared billing/authentication standard) to allow the European ease of provider-switching, but we do get the benefit of being able to argue CDMA vs. GSM while holding A's Sprint phone up against B's Cingular. ;) [I'll readily agree that the consumer gets screwed in the current US situation. A lot could be remedied simply by making phones legally transferrable; as it is, if I buy your old Cingular phone and you buy my Sprint one, we both face hell in trying to get them reactivated.] ...But getting back on track, a *different* aspect of regulation is that, in the US, we've mandated that the cellular providers must strive to provide GPS-accurate location info from callers requesting emergency services (and hopefully, not under other circumstances, barring a warrant at least). The first Google hit referencing the system [idg.net]. In practical terms, this means that pretty much every CDMA-network phone being built has the GPS chipset integrated (being destined mostly for the American market, with some penetration in Korea and Japan, IIRC), but a lot of GSM phones are being built for a market without the requirement. (Yes, GSM phones/hardware sold in the US are required to meet the same standard; at this point, it's a question of 'but if it's easy for the Evil Baddies to order a bunch of locator-free phones from France, we're back to triangulation...')*

So, those are the issues at hand, and they're mostly independent of eachother- you could mandate GPS-enabled GSM, you could build a 3G network on TDMA links (but that'd be an exercise in futility), you could demand Qualcomm add SIM-card equivalents to allow consumer choice among providers (who would, then, all still be Qualcomm customers, of course) if Qualcomm tech was decl

Re:Uhhh

[Troed]

You're buying into lies written up by American advertising companies. The best link [www.dn.se] I can give you without searching is in Swedish, unfortunately - but here's what it says.

During the -91 Gulf war media reported about Iraqi soldiers entering maternity wards and pulling babies out of their incubators, about women being raped and murdered, and men having their ears and toungues cut off. These incidents were one of many that helped swing the public opinion.

After the war, investigation revelaed that that information wasn't true - and was written up by an american advertisment company and it was paid for by Kuwait elite citizens.

Now ask yourself - how much of the things you think you _know_ about Iraqis/Saddam/Uday are true and what are lies to help swing the population to support this WE_NEED_OIL and WE_WANT_IRAQ_TO_BE_LIKE_THE_US war?

(btw, the Swedish article is from one of the most respected newspapers - and was written before the current US aggression began)

Re:An Insult to The Fighting, The Dead and Dying

[superyooser]

Report on the seven year old girl lying in a pool of her own blood, her intestines laying beside her.

And everybody knows it was an accident. But okay, let's have it your way. Oh no, blood and gore! Let's end the war! Would ending the war end the suffering? Saddam would like us to pack up and go home so he could resume power and get back to the tyrant's regular business of inflicting suffering of a brutal and excruciating nature on his subjects; this kind of suffering as opposed to the comparatively few, inadvertent casualties due to the war.

Having no war in Iraq allows persecution. Having this just war is causing suffering for a time, but will end most of the suffering in the long run.

Horrible suffering like what you mentioned is imposed affliction du jour in Saddam's regime. Its torture methods include: [state.gov]

• Medical experimentation
• Beatings
• Crucifixion
• Hammering nails into the fingers and hands
• Amputating the penis or breasts with an electric carving knife
• Spraying insecticides into a victim's eyes
• Branding with a hot iron
• Committing rape while the victim's spouse is forced to watch
• Pouring boiling water into a rectum
• Nailing the tongue to a wooden board
• Extracting teeth with pliers
• Using bees and scorpions to sting naked children in front of their parents

Report on the fact that the people of Iraq don't want to be "liberated."

Nine in 10 Iraqis welcome US invasion [asia1.com.sg]

With a smug smile they say, "We will liberate you from your God, your money, and your dignity."

"You just arrived. You're late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious. I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand. We came out of the grave. [guardian.co.uk]" - liberated Iraqi

Listen to the experience of a former human shield in Iraq [telegraph.co.uk]:

The human shields appealed to my anti-war stance, but by the time I had left Baghdad five weeks later my views had changed drastically.

...
I was shocked when I first met a pro-war Iraqi in Baghdad - a taxi driver taking me back to my hotel late at night. I explained that I was American and said, as we shields always did, "Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good". He looked at me with an expression of incredulity.

As he realised I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam's regime. ... It scared the hell out of me.

Re:My thoughts

[d34thm0nk3y]

from Webster's
imperialism: the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly : the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence

i especially like the part about "political or economic life"
so how are we americans not imperialist??

READ THIS

[upside]

Open http://www.gsmcoverage.co.uk/coverage.html and click on Iraq

Core points:

1. There already is a limited GSM network in Iraq, KurdTel 900
2. The Iraqi government has ordered a GSM network to be installed, but UN sanctions have delayed it
3. gsmcoverage.co.uk has this article on the subject:

Plans to deploy a CDMA network in Iraq (28-Mar-03)

The California, USA, Congressman Darrell Issa has initiated a campaign to promote CDMA as the technology of choice for any future mobile phone network in Iraq. He has written to U.S. Agency for International Development demanding that the American CDMA system be used in preference to a system that he considers inherently European, and specifically French.

His letter harks back to the older, and long abandoned name for GSM - Groupe Speciale Mobile, presumably for its French language overtones, as opposed to Global System for Mobile Communications, its anglophile name today. He says that if "European" GSM technology is deployed in Iraq, much of the equipment used to build the cell phone system would be manufactured in France, Germany, and elsewhere in western and northern Europe. Furthermore, royalties paid on the technology would flow to French and European sources, not U.S. patent holders.

He seems to be under the impression therefore that Motorola has no interest in bidding for a GSM infrastructure contract - nor would Lucent, or Canada's Nortel Networks. This may well concern the shareholders of those companies who would be expecting them to bid for any available contracts.

He also says that CDMA phones incorporate GPS location technology, which may be a surprise to the vast majority of cell phone owners who will be hunting through their handset manuals looking for this function. His legitimate concern is that relief workers could be kidnapped or attacked, and a location aware handset would then enable them to be found. However, inserting GPS into a cell phone is nothing to do with whether it is GSM or CDMA - but down to the handset manufacturer simply implementing a location based solution. Also, GPS is not the only solution for locating a cell phone, network based solutions exist that can be deployed on both technology platforms. The fact that a GPS handset will be able to give its location anywhere in Iraq is pointless if the phone is out of cellular coverage though.

Of course, the greatest irony could be that a CDMA network is deployed - and Nokia wins the bulk of the handset sales contracts. Ironic, as Nokia, one of the "northern Europe" companies that Issa wants to block from working in Iraq makes CDMA handsets, but uses its own proprietary chipsets and doesn't pay royalties to Qualcomm.

It may be worth noting that Congressman Issa represents San Diego, hometown of Qualcomm who owns the CDMA technology used in cell phones. Also, in January, the US government's, National Communications System (NCS) awarded a priority connection contract, ensuring phone service would be unaffected by network congestion to T-Mobile, a GSM network.

Re:My thoughts

[palfreman]

How does the caller know how much they will pay? Unless all phone companies are forced to charge the same rates, I don't see how caller pays can work reasonably.

Well, it does for me. I admit that I don't really pay too much attention to what mobile phone calls cost here in the UK (I don't have a landline, and the quality of this GSM only system makes a landline unnecessary), but from memory the cost is normally based on the network dialling code. So some are 07954 and some are 07713 etc.(they all begine with 07, to signify a mobile). The cost to me would normally depend on what deal my network (Vodaphone [vodaphone.co.uk]) has made with wholesale telephony providers and with each network. So calls (certainly used to) cost more to one network than another, and slightly differnt to a BT landline, and less to another Vodaphone. That doesn't apply to me, though, because I've specified in my contract that I pay a few pounds more line rental and pay the Vodaphone internal rate to all mobile and landlines, irrestpective of network. I'm quite unusual for doing that though.

Personally, I know the rate of mobile takeup in the US is years behind the rest of the world. I think a significant part of the reason for that is due to the person receiving the call having to pay for it. When someone calls me it doesn't cost me a penny, so I gain by letting people know my number. An American looses real money by distributing his mobile number around, so that has to hit take ups.

GSMA replies.

[The Cydonian]

Don't know if this is in duplicate, but here's the full text [unstrung.com] of the GSMA's reply.

Nice read, I might add, especially the bit about an American company installing a GSM network in (US-bombed) Afghanistan.