On Wednesday, January 9, 2002, at 12:23 , Victor Rehorst wrote:
> At least here in Canada we've had GSM for a while from Fido/CityFone,
> but
> the network is still smaller compared to Bell Canada's CDMA net or the
> massive analog coverage. OTOH, I could get GPRS if I really wanted to.
> Rogers AT&T is currently in the process of replacing their existing
> TDMA IS-136 digital net (which has pretty horrible call quality) with
> GSM.
> But still, that makes *six* different systems active at the same time:
Yes I know. The philosophy in North America was that the industry should
fight out the technology standards. This may seem to have been foolish
from today's viewpoint with GSM being available in 400 networks
worldwide however, there are both pros and cons to either philosophy and
I am not so sure how much incentive it has given the GSM world that
North America had different competing standards.
One could argue that if the entire world had decided on GSM, this may
have created a huge standard maintenance bureaucracy and possibly killed
off a lot of innovation.
The downside of the American model was of course that it took ages for
consolidation to determine a few viable survivors.
Then again, the industry in Europe was so over confident that they are
in danger of overshooting with 3G which is largely a result of GSM going
too steep in a short time and then when saturation kicked in the players
didn't want to accept that the frenzy is over.
rgds
bk
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