ct,
<< I simply responded to an overwhelming impulse to curmudge, and just haven't had enough practice to do it well. >>
A grand curmudgeon who has had lots of practice and has few sacred cows just parked his rant on the subject we discussed in my Inbox.
Maybe we can both learn from Curmudgeon Mike at Mobilecomms:
>> A Week in Wireless #94
Mike Hibberd
Mobile Communications International
28th March 2003
It was literally a case of stop press for "A Week In Wireless" yesterday. Or more specifically, stop press, shake heads in total disbelief and then make a long series of bemused phone calls. The upshot is that we’ve decided to run a special celebrity edition of "Winners and Losers" and bump it up to the front of this week’s newsletter. Why? Because, after 94 issues of doing this, we’ve arguably come across the biggest loser yet, the loser par excellence (ah, the irony). The normal Week In Wireless round-up follows. In the meantime, it’s over to you, Congressman…
[Winners and] Loser[s]
Roll out the Darrell
Well, dear readers, we haven’t featured a loser of this magnitude for quite some time. Darrell Issa (lahoooooozzeurr!), a Republican Congressman from California, has sent the most extraordinary letter to US Secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld and circulated the draft to his fellow lawmakers. The letter expresses Darrell’s incredulity at – and objection to – the US Government’s intention to fund the build-out of a GSM network in post-war Iraq.
Darrell, it seems, wants CDMA to be deployed in that troubled land, instead. He wants it so much that the thrust of his argument centres not on technical superiority or the principles of the free market, but on a timely anti-European sentiment that appears to border on the rabid. The full text of the letter is available at issa.house.gov (check it out, it’s good for a chuckle) but some choice quotations are just begging to be pulled out.
“We have learned that planners at the Department of Defense and USAID are currently envisioning using Federal appropriations to deploy a European-based wireless technology known as GSM (“Groupe Speciale Mobile”- this standard was developed by the French) for this new Iraqi cell phone system.”
Dear oh dear oh dear.
GSM was developed by a number of companies from a number of nations. These included, but were not limited to, Motorola (US), Alcatel (France) Ericsson (Sweden), Nokia (Finland), Siemens (Germany), STL (UK, part of STC, later sold to Nortel, Canadian) and Philips (The Netherlands). Philips’ infrastructure arm was sold to Lucent (US). Also, while CDMA is the clear market leader in the US, there are still some 16 million GSM users there, and US companies generate massive revenues from the GSM industry.
Meanwhile, GSM hasn’t stood for ‘Groupe Speciale Mobile’ for years – not since the mid 1990s. It stands for ‘Global System for Mobile Communications’ and it really is the only cellular standard that can lay claim to global reach. To attempt to stir up xenophobic prejudice with information this outdated would be sly if it weren’t so crude.
In any event, the original name was in French only because the CEPT, the body that started work on the GSM standard, (and has a moving headquarters, Portugal at the moment) has three official languages, French, German and English.
“If European GSM technology is deployed in Iraq,” Darrell witters on, “much of the equipment used to build the cell phone system will be manufactured in France by Alcatel, in Germany by Siemens, and elsewhere in western and northern Europe. Therefore, if our understanding of this situation is correct, because of ill-considered planning, the U.S. government will soon hand U.S. taxpayer dollars over to French, German, and other European cell phone equipment companies to build the new Iraqi cell phone system. This is not acceptable.”
Perhaps Darrell’s understanding of the situation is in fact incorrect. How does he know that the contracts will go to Alcatel or Siemens? They might go to Motorola, or Nortel. They might go to Ericsson or Nokia. And CDMA contracts might go to non-US players as well, don’t forget. It really doesn’t matter. The contract should go to the company with the most attractive pitch. The US is home to the ‘market decides’ philosophy; the Informer would have thought Darrell would understand this.
If GSM has been chosen (as it was in Afghanistan) it’s because it makes perfect sense. The Middle East is wholly GSM (with the exception of a little CDMA in Israel) and a rebuilt nation in the region would be severely hampered by a network incompatible with its immediate neighbours, or with nearly one billion users worldwide.
Conveniently, neither of Darrell’s offices have been answering the phone, so it was not possible to talk to the man himself. But the Informer is sure that CDMA vendors would not want their cause championed on anything other than technical and market grounds. Although…no, no, he’s sure. Perhaps Darrell is just trying to curry favour with his constituents. He does represent San Diego county, after all, which is home to Qualcomm. Having said that, a piece on Darrell’s website promises that he doesn’t spend his time “catering to special interests and keeping one eye on the next election.” Whether you believe that depends on whether or not you believe politicians in general. (It was Mark Twain, the Informer recalls, who said that every time he was interviewing a politician, he would think to himself: “Why is this b*stard lying to me?”).
Given the level of anti-French sentiment sweeping the US at the moment, this letter is snide politics at its worst. There’s a war on. Some people wanted it, some didn’t. They acted accordingly. But people from all sides are losing their lives. And to bleat away as this goes on, in an attempt to further the commercial interests of one technology, from one industry, from one country, is bad taste in the extreme.
The Informer wonders if Darrell sympathises with the group of people trying to erase the word ‘French’ from US conversation. Apparently it’s to be replaced with the word ‘Freedom’. Hence there’ll be burgers and Freedom fries, with Freedom dressing on the salad. New Orleans’ famous Freedom quarter will draw the tourists (let’s hope they’re not Freedoms). A Freedom kiss could lead to a situation in which a Freedom letter might be an appropriate accessory, especially if the Freedom knickers come off. Then there was the Freedom resistance... It would also surely be polite to return the Statue of Liberty to it’s original home – you don’t accept gifts from personae non gratae after all. And sending it back might not be a bad idea. Recalling other so-called ‘gifts’ (notably the Trojan Horse), it might be crammed full of nasty Frenchies waiting to leap out and wreak all kinds of havoc.
Anyway, the Informer would like to point out that he is neither dismissing the Americans, nor standing up for the Freedoms. As a Brit, of course, he’s not supposed to like either of ‘em.
Send your feedback about this silly man to: theinformer@mobilecomms.com
<snip>
On a final note, anyone who’d like to follow up Darrell Issa’s letter with one of their own on the CDMA for Iraq affair, could try writing to:
The Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
1000 Defense Pentagon
Washington, DC 20301
USA
And if you could put in a good word for the Week In Wireless team, and ask him not to have us disappeared or anything, we’d really appreciate it.
Right, not another word about that lousy jobsworth. We’re not going to let him spoil our weekend.
The Informer <<
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