Comment Articles

Standards row is misplaced battle

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 07 Apr 2003 13:21 BST

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 phone 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 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.