Rich,
That was an excellent explanation.
And now I understand why my cell phone service is poor and not likely to
get better any time soon.
George
Rich Comroe wrote:
We don't have to agree. I certainly respect differing opinions as
long as their from people that seem to know the field.
I thought the switch to 2nd gen "put up whatever you want" was a
departure from earlier FCC stand ... when all 1st gen cellular
systems would follow the TIA approved AMPS standard. Why do I think
the change was not for our best? Because the US manufacturers went
from world domination of cellular (you could take your amps phone
anywhere in the world), to last place (almost the entire world
adopted the GSM standard in the face of the US meltdown in digital
cellular standards). You can dislike GSM, but it became the defacto
world standard and you can take your GSM phone anywhere. US cellular
manufacturers world market share plumeted, and manufacturers that
built to the USDC (TIA IS54) and CDMA (TIA IS95) found very few
foreign markets that would accept product. The US became one of the
very few nations on the planet where a carrier could deploy anything
they wanted. The NexTel system, likewise, can be found almost
nowhere except US / Canada. Pick any 2 people in the US with
cellphones, and it's more likely than not they are incompatible & not
able to receive service from the same tower. Technically it provides
everyone in the entire United States with inferior coverage
(considering the number of total towers providing service), more
expensive phones (multi-mode), inferior voice quality (extra voice
decoding / recoding becuase they all have incompatible voice codecs),
and additional voice latency. Eventually European GSM became yet
another US deployed technology adding to the mish-mosh.
US Standards participants coined the phrase "if one standard is good,
multiple standards are better." This is non-sense. If there's not a
single standard you have no standard. A single standards does not
inhibit technology, because standards continuously evolve and
eventually extend to new technologies in a compatible, planned way.
Just look at 802.11 ... it's a classic example of an "evolving"
standard. Standards do inhibit something ... but it's not technology
... its the choice to deploy whatever you want. It imposes a certain
discipline for the general public ... which I think is a good thing.
It's disheartening as all hell to look at a field near me with 4
antenna towers (3 of them 500ft) and a different wisp providing
service from each (from an interference standpoint). There's roughly
30 different 5.7GHz transmitters all within 1000ft and LOS of each
other. There's so many examples like this which simply scream at you
that the wisps would collectively have benefitted were some minimum
media access procedures common across all these devices.
Anyways, I appreciate your thoughts and enjoy comparing differing
opinions.
peace, Rich
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