From: ahk@chinet.com

Stephen Sprunk  wrote:
>On 22-Apr-15 09:16, John Levine wrote:

>>>>It's just like the stupidity of our CDMA/TDMA/iDEN war while the
>>>>world standardized on GSM.  Despite its flaws, GSM is far
>>>>superior to all of the US-developed systems _and_ costs less due
>>>>to economy of scale, which is why all US carriers are finally
>>>>moving that way.

>>>Oh, c'mon, GSM came later. And it was mostly Europe that decided to
>>>use an international standards-making process because of the
>>>relatively small countries; I don't recall any other part of the
>>>world being involved.

>>Quite right.  It was developed by ETSI, where E stands for European.

>It was developed by CEPT and later transferred to ETSI.

That would be the consortium of European post offices, not a world-wide
standards-making process, so your earlier statement was wrong. Who else
would have developed it? Under European socialism, the post office was
put in charge of the telephone infrastructure. There were probably a
few exceptions, but I don't know what they would have been.

>>It's a brilliant implementation of mediocre TDMA technology.
>>Putting the phone's identity in the SIM wasn't a new idea but they
>>made it work.

>GSM isn't particularly clever; the point was that everyone (except the
>US) quickly standardized on GSM, so they got economy of scale, and for
>commercialization, that's usually more important than cleverness.

That's still ridiculous. The United States had the world's largest
market for cellular service at the time, so don't give us your
"economy of scale" nonsense. In Europe, they formed a consortium to
avoid different standards in neighboring countries, and in turn created
a large enough market for themselves, but golly, they could have benefitted
from the same "economy of scale" just by adopting an existing standard.

As GSM is an evolutionary change to TDSM, and not a revolutionary replacement,
what's wrong with that? Doesn't mean there was anything bad about TDSM
to begin with. Engineering is supposed to evolve and improve over time.

In any event, your argument doesn't work because you have to pick and
choose your costs and ignore other costs. There are major infrastructure
costs of the cell phone network that don't scale up, like erection of
towers and equipping them and connecting them to the telephone network.
Sure, individual parts benefit from mass manufacture, but a whole lot
is individually customized on a per-location basis.

The main cost is dividing and managing available spectrum.

It's like arguing that Henry Ford's commercially successful production line
manufacturing system demonstrated "economy of scale" in automobile
transportation, completely ignoring that acquisition of right of way
and road and highway and bridge building absolutely do not scale up.

That's what you're failing to address with PTC: It has huge costs,
probably the vast majority of its costs, that just don't scale up.

>ETSI standards often get used elsewhere simply because the rest of the
>world (except the US) doesn't see the point in developing competing
>standards.  GSM, for instance, was deployed in Australia in 1993, not
>long after Europe's first GSM network went live in 1991.

Oh, bullshit. It's whichever manufacturer reaches the market first. If it's
Nokia, they'd push for standards compatible with what they're already
manufacturing, or Motorola, with one of the standards they contributed to.

>For cellular networks, that's not necessarily a good thing.  Ideally,
>you'd use 1800/1900 for small, urban cells and 800/900 for umbrella or
>rural cells.  But that's not how FCC spectrum auctions work.

That's an interesting point.

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