[missing-sync-palmos-talk] [OT] Coverage

[Brad Knowles]

At 11:27 PM -0700 2005-04-30, Paul Berkowitz wrote:

>  I did note that someone said that Verizon has a CDMA (?) network, not GSM.
>  The Cingular salesman on the phone did say that CDMA was better and was what
>  they have "in Europe". Not surprisingly he did not mention that the
>  competition here also has it. What's the scale of the difference?

	Technology-wise, CDMA has a number of advantages.  For carriers, 
if you use CDMA you can cram in more calls in a given set of signal 
bandwidth than you could if you were to use TDMA or GSM (GSM being 
similar to TDMA at this level within the technology).

	GSM is obviously more widely used in the world, whereas the only 
major markets using CDMA are the US and Korea (and the US also uses 
GSM, albeit on different frequency bands than elsewhere in the 
world).  GSM also allows you to do things like three-way calling, 
whereas CDMA has problems in this area (the CDMA Treos can't do 
three-way calling whereas the GSM Treos can, and this is due to the 
underlying technology).

	In terms of what the technology is capable of providing today to 
the typical end-user, there's not that much difference between them. 
Most of the differences are behind-the-scenes and are primarily 
visible to the carriers.


	Note that the new "3G" communications systems are all based on 
CDMA, whether you're talking about CDMA2000 or UMTS, and the work to 
develop these technologies came from all the different players in the 
market, including many companies that today work exclusively or 
primarily with GSM.  In the not-too-distant future, all mobile phones 
used world-wide will be using some form of CDMA.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.