Cellphones in Iraq: Qualcomm memories
I have to thank Mqurice Winn for uncovering these two jewels regarding our corrupt public officials and the awarding of contracts in occupied Iraq.
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montanaforum.com
WorldCom critics angered by government deal in Iraq
Associated Press, May 22, 2003
NEW YORK (AP) – The Pentagon made an interesting choice when it hired a U.S. company to build a small wireless phone network in Iraq: MCI, aka WorldCom Inc., perpetrator of the biggest accounting fraud in American business and not exactly a big name in cellular service.
The Iraq contract incensed WorldCom rivals and government watchdogs who say Washington has been too kind to the company since WorldCom revealed its $11 billion accounting fraud and plunged into bankruptcy last year.
"We don’t understand why MCI would be awarded this business given its status as having committed the largest corporate fraud in history," said AT&T Corp. spokesman Jim McGann. "There are many qualified, financially stable companies that could have been awarded that business, including us."
"I was curious about it, because the last time I looked, MCI’s never built out a wireless network," said Len Lauer, head of Sprint Corp.’s wireless division.
The contract in Iraq is part of a short-term communications plan costing the Defense Department about $45 million, said Lt. Col. Ken McClellan.
The Pentagon also plans to have Motorola Corp. establish radio communications for security forces in Baghdad, a deal worth $10 million to $25 million depending on the options exercised, said McClellan, a Pentagon spokesman. The contract with WorldCom – which plans to adopt the name of its MCI long distance unit when it emerges from bankruptcy – has prompted grumbling in the telecommunications industry from people who say it was not put up for bids.
"We were not aware of it until it showed up in some news reports," Motorola spokesman Norm Sandler said.
McClellan said he had no details on the process that led to the deal, which he said was signed early this month. WorldCom spokeswoman Natasha Haubold declined to comment on details of the contract.
The company is to build a small wireless network with 19 cell towers that can serve 5,000 to 10,000 mobile phones used by reconstruction officials and aid workers in the Baghdad area.
The network, using the GSM wireless standard dominant in Europe and the Middle East, is expected to be running by July.
"This is an interim, quick government solution – this is not the basis for some national long-term solution for Iraq," McClellan said. "That will probably have to be undertaken by the Iraqis."
WorldCom is not a commercial wireless carrier. It once resold other wireless carriers’ service in the United States but dropped that approach recently.
However, Haubold said her company is fully qualified to perform the Iraq work.
She pointed to the company’s work on a wireless system in Haiti in the 1990s and a 2002 contract, in which it served as a subcontractor, to provide long-distance connections for a wireless network in Afghanistan.
McClellan agreed that WorldCom’s experience in Haiti and Afghanistan is "analogous work" to what is needed in Iraq.
Haubold also stressed the company’s overall deep relationship with the U.S. military and government.
In fact, a recent review by Washington Technology, a trade newspaper that follows computing-related sales to the government, found that WorldCom jumped to eighth among all federal technology contractors in 2002, with $772 million in sales.
It was the first time WorldCom cracked the top 10.
That $772 million figure refers only to deals in which WorldCom is the prime contractor to federal agencies. The company gets much more taxpayer money – exactly how much is not disclosed – from state contracts and from federal deals in which it is a subcontractor. That infuriates WorldCom critics, who say the government has kept the company afloat while the General Services Administration barred Enron and Arthur Andersen from getting contracts after their scandals emerged.
They also say it shows how little WorldCom would be hurt by the proposed $500 million fine the company has agreed to pay to settle Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charges.
"The $500 million is in a sense, laundered by the taxpayers," said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste.
Although the Iraq wireless deal is minor compared to other government contracts WorldCom has won – including a satellite data pact announced Tuesday with the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration – Schatz found it questionable.
"Why would you have a company that is not really in that line of business providing that service for another country?" he said. "Given the circumstances and the bailout the government seems to be engaged in, that is certainly is not fair to their competitors or the taxpayers."
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zdnet.com.au
GSM vs CDMA: Does it matter in Iraq?
By Rupert Goodwins, Special to ZDNet, April 8, 2003
COMMENTARY--The fighting's far from over, so why are people blustering about cellphone standards in the reconstruction to come?
It is hard to think of the future of Iraq when the present is so harrowing. The war may be cowboys versus gangsters, imperialism versus indigenous people, Christianity versus Islam, democracy versus tyranny, freedom versus oppression. It'll be the job of history to put things in context, and we must hope for a world where history is allowed to tell the truth. For now, the proper wish is for a quick ending.
So writing about telecommunications standards in post-war Iraq seems almost criminally trivial. It would be the thought furthest from my mind were it not for United States Congressman Darrell Issa, who a couple of weeks ago circulated a lobbying letter to Congress entitled "Parlez-vous français?". In it, the charming politician pointed out that GSM stood for Groupe Systeme Mobile, and thus was obviously developed by the French (it wasn't, as he later corrected). In the rebuilding of Iraq, he continued, it was important that such nastiness be avoided and the contracts for the mobile phone system be awarded to CDMA, the American digital phone standard.
It is easy to attack this sort of posturing on grounds of taste, sanity and special interests, so let's get the cheap shots in first. It was excruciatingly tasteless to bluster on about cellphones with thousands dying and thousands yet to die. The sanity of any country where French fries are renamed Freedom Fries is questionable (although our own dear royal family renamed themselves the House of Windsor in the First World War, as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was thought to be a bit, well, Germanic. I would not hold them up as icons of sanity). As for special interests: Congressman Issa is the recipient of thousands of dollars of campaign funding from Qualcomm, the company that in effect owns the CDMA standard. But even so, is there some basis of fact in his claim?
As you'd expect from a standard around ten years younger, CDMA has some technological advantages over GSM. You can cram more calls into the same chunk of spectrum, it's more resistant to noise and it handles congestion better. If there were no mobile phones on the planet and there was a competition on purely technical merit, CDMA would most likely win. But there are, there isn't, and it won't.
Take a marketing perspective. CDMA has around 12 percent of the global market, GSM nearly 70. This has certain implications: there are many more models of GSM phones than there are CDMA, and the best features appear on GSM first (and sometimes stay there). Every country in Europe and the Middle East is on GSM, and roaming between operators and countries is a fact of life. Take a GSM phone to America, and you have a good chance of it working. Try doing it in reverse with CDMA.
It's analogous to the world of PCs in the early 90s. The IBM PC standard was no beauty--there were plenty of alternatives that worked better and did more with less, at least as far as the hardware and operating system went. But it was open--there were lots of manufacturers and software companies on the scene, prices were low and availability was high. A vigorous market developed, and soon it didn't matter how much better the alternatives were--they'd be stuck in niches. For what people wanted computers to do, the PC had the best answer. It would be unthinkable for a country to mandate that only Macintoshes be allowed. The analogy is close: Apple, like Qualcomm, kept a tight grasp on their technology and only let others use it with ill-concealed bad grace, if at all.
If the main purpose of the reconstruction of Iraq is to give the country a firm footing in reality and to equip it for life among the modern nations, then the purpose of its mobile phone network must be to let as many people communicate as cheaply as possible and with as few restrictions and as many benefits as possible. This must include roaming with its neighbours, exposure to the benefits of the best and liveliest market in both infrastructure and handsets, and the chance for indigenous skills to develop with the best chance of being useful in the world outside. On all these fronts, you can't knock GSM.
That none of these factors informed Congressman Issa's stance is indicative that our old European suspicions concerning America's intentions may be worth holding onto for a little longer. Once the war is over and we've counted all the weapons of mass destruction, the test of what happens next is entirely "does it benefit the Iraqis?". I'm sure that everybody on either side of the Atlantic looks forward to the day when the biggest concern of a Baghdad schoolkid is which mobile phone to get for their birthday. That, Mr Issa, is the only acceptable standard for mobile communications in the rebuilt Iraq. |
