General > General Technical Chat
USA 3G sunset - swapping SIM could create headache
Rick Law:
--- Quote from: tooki on August 01, 2021, 12:18:35 am ---...
Standardization of the network standards wasn’t the issue to which I was referring. That was a done deal (except for Nextel) long before. (VZW and Spring on CDMA, ATT and T-Mo on GSM. The 90s in USA were littered with many non-GSM phone standards, such as “old” ATT’s TDMA and Nextel’s proprietary thing.)
Before the iPhone, the carriers sold nearly all handsets, and dictated to the handset makers what their phones could and couldn’t do. (Again: almost nobody brought their own devices.)
Apple broke this model by giving the networks no control over the device software. I told you what happened. I told you when. I’ve provided independent proof of this. Why are you still confused about what I am (and what I am not!) saying?! :-//
--- End quote ---
Our recollections really differ. But, not a difference worth more ink. I'll just accept that we recollect differently.
bson:
--- Quote from: Rick Law on July 30, 2021, 07:06:17 pm ---I personally think Europe in 1990/1991 adopted (and rolled out) the GSM standard was the real big game changer in cell phones standardization and interoperability. That drove GSM to become the global standard dominating everywhere else except the USA. The USA's remaining big non-GSM was Verizon's CDMA. The rest of the non-GSM carriers pretty much became small niche players or joined the GSM bang wagon.
--- End quote ---
That's not nearly an accurate history.
Metro-PCS in the U.S. was a service to target millions of users in urban areas. TDMA couldn't scale to these proportions; European GSM evolved from local standards like NMT and was designed for a very small set of high-paying customers to have mobile phone access, usually with a car phone. TDMA was focused on broad geographic coverage, not a large number of customers. CDMA was adopted in the U.S. and Asia exactly because of the different markets: cheap service to millions of urban users rather than an expensive luxury for politicians and CEOs to always be available. By 3G is was clear TDMA was a dead end, and CDMA was adopted for GSM. It was also clear the U.S. and Asian market prediction was bulls-eye spot on, and the old GSM model couldn't meet it. But instead of simply adopting existing CDMA systems, a completely new system was invented to prevent U.S. and Asian equipment vendors from dominating the European market. At that time state phone companies were often still closely tied into manufacturing. So an incompatible standard, neither technical better or worse, was invented with entirely new patent coverage to guarantee European telcos had a chance to remain in the game. Americans and Asians played along too, since that was their only avenue to enter the European market. European telcos would have been too far behind without a fresh start, and the market would quickly have been dominated by Americans and Asians. It's not CDMA that was incompatible with 3GPP and 4G, it was GSM that was the gratuitously incompatible system.
Operator lock-in has little to nothing to do with network compatibility. That's just subscriber access control, which operates at a higher layer.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page
Go to full version