iPhone 4 - Verizon - CDMA - Old Technology

[AllieNeko]

Gecko, I posted that a few posts up, but do you think he really cares? Isn't it clear the point is to bash on Americans, not to really have any discussion of technology? Oh well...

 

[Geckotek]

Gecko, I posted that a few posts up, but do you think he really cares? Isn't it clear the point is to bash on Americans, not to really have any discussion of technology? Oh well...

Yeah, read your reply after I posted mine.

 

[ArmCortexA8]

Holy Moly

I started world war 3 here. All I am saying is that Australia uses a more advanced version of CDMA, commonly referred to UTMS, which means we dont have to manufacture "customised" version of the iPhone for a CDMA network. All our mobiles from whatever manufacturer all work on UMTS 3G either via Optus or Telstra. Im indicating that US CDMA network should be on UMTS or equivalent as we are here.

I find it laughable they have a launch for a "modified" iPhone 4 just because it works on CDMA, because the mobile phone companies could not a agree on a standard or set of standards governing mobile phone networks. Look at Australia, no CDMA, no special "modified" handsets to work on a phone network, as all handsets work fine on our "standards". Pity the US couldn't think this far ahead.

You never trust a bunch of private telecommunications companies to come up with an agreement on matters like this - as they will all choose their own version. As for LTE its in the works at the moment with Telstra and other companies. As for EVDO / Edge these are ONLY used as fallback networks when 3G is not attainable - they are not used for the majority of the time.

 

[Mactrillionaire]

Telstra (formerly Telecom Australia) was started by the taxpayers as a Government owned asset which was also owned by the people - its still the largest Telecommunications Company in Australia. This was illegally privatised and sold off without the permission of the Australia people who are still the owners. Optus also operates in Australia (Singapore Government Owned Subsidiary) and they too use UMTS 3G 2100mhz as well. No Australian telecommunications companies use CDMA anymore. Handy hint from the Australian way, never rely on companies who's only motivation is profit, to establish standards for a mobile phone network. Look at the result in your own backyard.

Unless you are suggesting someone other than those who produce the most desired economic goods should be in charge of producing economic value, we have to stick with profit as the motivation. We can't pick a different motivation for other individuals in a market, regardless of what their role is (i.e., some people are going to be primarily motivated by economic value, others will be primarily motivated by accumulation of economic power). Government interference in determining what wireless technology to use won't solve the profit motivation problem. Don't get me wrong, though, I'm no fan of the fact that the US is using ancient technology to profit more, that some of even North Korea's technology makes what the US is still using look like third-world technology by comparative standards, but profit as a motivation is better than a dictator making these kinds of decisions or certain people holding other people hostage to their demands.

 

[Geckotek]

Holy Moly

I started world war 3 here. All I am saying is that Australia uses a more advanced version of CDMA, commonly referred to UTMS, which means we dont have to manufacture "customised" version of the iPhone for a CDMA network. All our mobiles from whatever manufacturer all work on UMTS 3G either via Optus or Telstra. Im indicating that US CDMA network should be on UMTS or equivalent as we are here.

UMTS (WCDMA) was a progression of GSM, NOT CDMA. Yes, it uses the same base concepts/technology of CDMA, but it's not the same thing and is NOT just a newer version of CDMA. Back when the NTT DoCoMo wanted a 3G standard and they realized TDMA wasn't going to cut it, yet they didn't want to pay Qualcomm big royalties, they came up with WCDMA. Around this same time Verizon was deeply invested in CDMA and moving forward with the normal progression of CDMA's 3G plan which was 1xRTT. (WCDMA had not become a standard for UMTS until later). This happened in 2001. (Hutchison didn't start rolling out 3G services in Australia until 2003 and AT&T not until mid-2004) So Verizon could either upgrade their current network which had a much easier 3G upgrade path years before the competition or wait longer for a technology that was still in development and standardization which would require them to replace all the switches in their entire network.

If I were a Verizon stockholder, I know which path I'd want Verizon to pick.

Fast-forward a decade and Verizon users have experienced 3G service for longer with faster speeds for several years. However, GSM has adopted WCDMA and finally caught up speed-wise in the past 2 years. With the development of CDMA slowing down, Verizon is now making the wise move to migrate to LTE.

It appears the timing of the decisions in Australia fell differently since they launched 2 years later and perhaps it made more sense to dump CDMA for WCDMA by then. But you can't directly compare what happened there with what happened here. There are way too many factors involved....timing only being one of them.

So please stop spouting off a bunch of things about wireless technology...because you don't understand it all and you're getting a lot of facts wrong. We don't have a "customized" version of the iPhone. We have an iPhone created for the CDMA standard that is still used by many other countries worldwide. You will probably see this same model go to China soon, among others.

And regarding standardizing on one technology, we encourage competition and don't like our government making all our decisions for us.

 

[seenew]

All I am saying is that Australia uses a more advanced version of CDMA

No, that's not all you're saying. You're saying a lot of stuff, mostly the same stuff, repeatedly.

I'm in Australia where we use the latest and most current mobile phone network technology...

...makes me wonder why the USA which proclaims its so technologically advanced, uses such an old and antiquated CDMA phone network...

...the primary and largest mobile phone network in Australia - world's best.

...proves how badly the US have remained backwards technologically. I am surprised that the US hold onto such old technology for so long with a Australia with a smaller population uses the later technology.

...Makes me glad in Australia we have newer technology and not holding onto the old.

At least Australia had the planning and ideas in place to release a national network in a country which has a land mass larger than the US itself - not a small feat by any means.

The land mass of Australia is larger or equivalent to the US, which means deploying a network in Australia is probably a larger and more expensive challenge.

...Australia is technologically more advanced and planned well ahead and is now the world leader in mobile phone network technology.

...a lot of trash

 

[Geckotek]

Wow, after seeing it all laid out like that, it's obvious this guy is just a troll with a chip on his shoulder named U.S.A.

What happened, did your girlfriend dump you for a smarter American guy with a CDMA phone?

 

[iammike1]

What happened, did your girlfriend dump you for a smarter American guy with a CDMA phone?

This seriously made me LOL.

 

[Mactrillionaire]

Yeah, I laugh too every time someone from a country still having corporal punishment complains about how bad another country not having it is.

 

[adztaylor]

Wow, after seeing it all layed out like that, it's obvious this guy is just a troll with a chip on his shoulder named U.S.A.

What happened, did your girlfriend dump you for a smarter American guy with a CDMA phone?

Haha

But seriously, the OP seems clueless.

 

[bergmef]

The US is holding onto old technology because the US Government left it to private companies to dictate multiple mobile telecommunications standards on the hope the multiple companies would agree on a standard - obviously this has failed miserably hence the US still use CDMA. What you don't know is that I was on CDMA when it was in use and when we upgraded to UMTS 3G it literally blew CDMA out of the water. At least Australia had the planning and ideas in place to release a national network in a country which has a land mass larger than the US itself - not a small feat by any means. Im not talking trash Im comparing and questioning why the US still use CDMA when Australia use UMTS 3G. Our standards were not fully dictated to by Government, but all the network providers use the same UMTS network.

Verizon has better coverage for phones in the US. ATT, where they have service, can have higher speeds. Verizon is rolling out LTE now and has a bunch of cities covered with all lte backhaul being fiber. I know in australia you guys already have lte up and running, but why do you care about the US? I honestly don't care about coverage in places I don't go. Way too many other things to worry about. If you come here, complain or praise att depending on your experience.

 

[Lotso]

The land mass of Australia is larger or equivalent to the US, which means deploying a network in Australia is probably a larger and more expensive challenge. As for paying for the network, well if the US keep using their fractional reserve banking system to water down the wealth of the country, then the US is in dire straights to say the least. If Australia can do it, so can the US.

So do they have cell service in the outback? Which is an extremely large portion of Australia.

 

[Mavimao]

To the OP:

I just have a quick question, because I didn't quite get the point...

Is Australia technologically more advanced and planned well ahead and is it now the world leader in mobile phone network technology?

 

[ReallyBigFeet]

It seems the US, unlike Australia did not have a planned / structured mobile phone network plan - hence why companies were pushing their own technologies which actually made it more expensive business wise and more confusing for the customer, and more expensive for the mobile handset manufacturer. With any rollout of any network, certain things have to be set in concrete to enable similarity between providers. In the case of the US, they really stuffed up big time and no wonder they are still using CDMA while Australia uses UMTS 3G.

You are almost right.

The US, unlike Australia, has had a far larger base of installed users with handsets and contracts. The telco's here have been far more focused on extracting every possible value out of their aging network infrastructure before finally investing in the next generation. It has nothing to do with the "US" as the "US" didn't make that decision. Independent, capitalistic telco's made that decision. We as consumers have choices....we can either pay for network speeds that they offer or do without.

I'd argue that another very important distinction was that the Australian government controlled your telcom services until what....1987? So your recently (by American telco historical standards) privatized telco providers had no legacy architecture and infrastructure to really worry about depreciating. They started at a newer base level than ours did. This means that, all things being equal, your infrastructure would enjoy newer tech perks since most of your telco's are running on infrastructure that is about 30 years old.

PS: What good is all that extra speed in Australia when your government censors almost everything you can say online (including the archaic concept of blasphemy) and totally makes porn and many top-selling video games illegal? In fact, don't almost all video game production houses have to release a special Australian version of their games just to adapt to your lack of freedom of expression and free speech?

As an American citizen, I really don't want to trade an extra megabit on my iPhone for my right to say what I want online, watch what I want online and otherwise use the service without such Victorian restrictions. But that's just me.

 

[iPhysicist]

Dont forget that every Australian has criminal ancestors...

 

[aristobrat]

I find it laughable they have a launch for a "modified" iPhone 4 just because it works on CDMA, because the mobile phone companies could not a agree on a standard or set of standards governing mobile phone networks.

550 million customers = worldwide CDMA subscriptions
090 million customers = Verizon

There's HALF OF A BILLION people using CDMA across the world. That's a sizable market. That's 26x more people than the population of your country.

If find your thought laughable that you think that the reason Nokia, HTC, Motorola, Palm, Sony Ericsson -- and now Apple -- manufacture CDMA phones is because US mobile phone companies don't all use the same world-wide standards for mobile phone networks.

 

[Applejuiced]

What happened, did your girlfriend dump you for a smarter American guy with a CDMA phone?

Lmao

 

[Menzo]

The OP is one arrogant prick with a chip on his shoulder about the US that's for sure.

As a fellow Australian I apologise for his behaviour lol.

 

[Stinkypalm]

I hear their advanced CDMA will soon be underwater. Global warming is a bitc*

 

[Lotso]

I hear their advanced CDMA will soon be underwater. Global warming is a bitc*

Not cool.

 

[JoeG4]

lol, you're bragging about telco services in Aus? How do you like your really overpriced broadband with crappy low caps? Yeah. Thought so

 

[dccorona]

Australia only has 24 million people and yet we upgraded our mobile phone network completely, and if its to do with the cost of upgrading, the US would get a return on investment a lot quicker due to their population. We in Australia have more mobile phones than the population of the country.

there's a lot less ground to cover in australia...most places in the US, people want service. And its larger than Australia. People in australia are (from what I've seen) mostly accumulated around the coast. They don't have to cover the center as well there...so it would be cheaper to upgrade than a US network

 

[NathanA]

OP (& everyone else),

Here is a MUST-READ article written by one of the engineers who used to work for Qualcomm; in a lot of ways it is ancient history, but it still remains an interesting, fascinating, and (I think) insightful read, nonetheless: http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/GSM3G.shtml

(...and after you're done with that, you can read a blog post that he links to at the end of his own post that discusses CDMA vs. GSM rollouts in Australia: http://michaeljennings.blogspot.com/2002_10_06_michaeljennings_archive.html#82598395)

-- Nathan

 

[yayitsezekiel]

OP (& everyone else),

Here is a MUST-READ article written by one of the engineers who used to work for Qualcomm; in a lot of ways it is ancient history, but it still remains an interesting, fascinating, and (I think) insightful read, nonetheless: http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/GSM3G.shtml

(...and after you're done with that, you can read a blog post that he links to at the end of his own post that discusses CDMA vs. GSM rollouts in Australia: http://michaeljennings.blogspot.com/2002_10_06_michaeljennings_archive.html#82598395)

-- Nathan

That was a very intriguing article. It makes the Verizon iPhone seem more awesome!

 

[ArmCortexA8]

For the record I have no issues with the US per say. My original post started because I found it surprising that they even had an iPhone 4 announcement for the CDMA network. I am doing comparisons between CDMA and UMTS 3G, and if Australia saw fit to dump CDMA years ago with a smaller population and replaced this technology with a newer version, why hadn't the US done this before us? Hence why I was surprised to hear of a CDMA phone launch for Verizon.

If CDMA is so good, why did Australia only keep it for a short amount of time before replacing it with UMTS 3G? Personally, the only advantage I can see with CDMA is no SIM card so the handset time and date etc is set by the network. Notice Australia don't launch a CDMA handset for any mobile provider, because its no longer supported.

It looks like Telstra (Formerly Telecom Australia) had the foresight to upgrade quickly after CDMA to bridge the gap so to speak and then they announced the CDMA network would be shut down. Makes me ponder why the US never took a similar route. In summary I thought the US would be on UMTS 3G as Australia is, and I'm only comparing the US with Australia.

BTW: At least here in Australia we can purchase a mobile outright and unlocked - no contracts, unlike the US.