From: ce11son@yahoo.ca

On Wed, 22 Apr 2015 16:18:17 +0000 (UTC), "Adam H. Kerman"
 wrote:

>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.
>
In most cases long before socialism was a working (FSVO "working")
concept. Communications were generally kept within control of
government agencies from long ago, the most convenient department
tending to be the national Post Office which already dealt with
letters and later usually inherited telegraphs followed by telephones.
Describing the governments at the relevant times as "socialist" would
in most cases be a bit of a joke.

>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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