The Economist, January 12th, 2002 edition:
Does South Korea lead the world in third-generation mobile telecoms, or has it gone down a dead end?
"....The split goes back to the early 1990s, when countries were moving from first-generation analogue phones to second-generation digital ones. Most governments—including many in East Asia—chose to adopt the European standard, GSM, which is now used in about 65% of the world's mobile networks. South Korea, however, opted for a rival standard called CDMA, which is used in around 15% of the world's networks. So far this has been a nuisance mainly to Asian and European travellers to South Korea, where they find that their GSM phones do not work.
Now, however, it is proving a boon, because both rival 3G technologies, CDMA2000 and W-CDMA, are (as their names suggest) based on CDMA. Suddenly, equipment makers and operators that are already using CDMA have a head start. In such countries as South Korea, Brazil, India and Mexico, where existing 2G networks already use CDMA, upgrading to 3G's higher speeds in the form of CDMA2000 is relatively cheap and simple. Countries that adopted GSM, however, are having to build new networks from scratch at great expense. As a result, some parts of the developing world may have high-speed mobile networks before many European countries.
Unfortunately, W-CDMA, the 3G standard that has been adopted by the Japanese and Europeans, is incompatible with CDMA2000, the version in South Korea and elsewhere. The former has been plagued by technical problems; aside from a few small experimental networks, no W-CDMA systems are yet up and running outside Japan. This is largely because W-CDMA is entirely new—unlike CDMA2000, which is an evolution of a mature standard. Another problem is that the W-CDMA camp is much larger than its rival, which means it takes longer to get everybody to agree, and to get their equipment to work together. The huge debts run up by European operators to pay for their 3G licences may have slowed things down too.
The result is a face-off between CDMA2000 technology, which is already available, and W-CDMA technology, which is late and more expensive, but is more widely backed. Hardcore supporters of the former argue that the entire W-CDMA initiative will collapse, enabling CDMA2000 to emerge as the world standard. More realistically, makers of CDMA2000 equipment, such as Lucent Technologies, hope to tempt 3G operators to defect from W-CDMA...."
economist.com
- Fred |
