Tag Archives: Scandinavia

About 2485 days ago Mobility Tips and Tricks

Alphabet Soup: What are GSM, CDMA, and TDMA?

Savvy businesspeople know the details of their business down to the brass tacks, but most have no clue how their cell phones work — despite, according to the trade publication Cellular News, spending almost $1,000 annually to service each individual phone. The technology may seem dense, but what helps is to understand that there are three main categories of cell phones represented by an alphabet soup of foreboding anagrams: GSM, TDMA and CDMA. GSM is a type of TDMA. And, if that isn’t confusing enough, GSM and CDMA are the main competing cell phone technologies. In order to make the right decision on cell phone technology for your business and employees, it’s important to understand the basics. Here’s a rundown on what the letters stand for and how the technology works: GSM IS MOST WIDELY USED GSM stands for Global System for Mobile Communications. If you are making a phone call, it almost certainly is on GSM, the de-facto cell phone technology standard today. More than two billion customers worldwide use GSM phones, an estimated 80 percent of mobile phone users globally, according to the GSM Association, the London-based trade group that represents 690 GSM mobile phone operators in 214 countries and territories. GSM uses several different frequency ranges to connect calls. Like radio stations, each region has a different band of frequency that GSM networks utilize. The Americas use 850 or 1900 MHz, and other continents use 900 or 1800 MHz. A few countries — in Scandinavia, for example — use 400 and 450 MHz. GSM is known as 2G (second-generation) technology, meaning it is part of the second major upgrade in modern cell phone technology. “GSM differs from first-generation wireless systems in that it uses digital technology and time division multiple access [TDMA] transmission methods,” says the GSM Association. Advantages: The technology is mature. The network is stable. The features are robust. This leads to more consistent service and less signal deterioration inside structures, such as buildings. Disadvantages: GSM transmission has a pulse nature which can interfere with some electronics, including pace makers and hearing aides, according to the GSM Association. This is why hospitals require people to turn off their cell phones. GSM IS A TYPE OF TDMA TDMA stands for Time Division Multiple Access. A common radio technology, TDMA is the foundation of GSM. As the name suggests, time division multiple access takes designated broadcast frequencies and divides them up so multiple users can use them. Advantages: This technique frees up other broadcast signals for other uses. Disadvantages: A well-noted challenge is the interference caused by multiple users sharing the same bandwidth. The new 3G Wireless technology, which uses CDMA, provides less call interference. CDMA IS THE FOUNDATION FOR 3G WIRELESS CDMA stands for Code-Division Multiple Access. Originally invented during World War II in England to thwart German wire interference, CDMA splits each phone conversation into pieces that follow unique but random routes. The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based CDMA Development Group describes it as a “‘spread spectrum’ technology, allowing many users to occupy the same time and frequency allocations in a given band/space.” Other technologies use one particular wireless frequency to transmit information. CDMA uses multiple paths (hence the name code-division multiple access) on each transmission, making it difficult to stop or eavesdrop on a particular conversation. Qualcomm brought CDMA technology to cell phones in the late ’80s and currently owns the patents to code-division multiple access. Thus, when you use CDMA, Qualcomm is making a profit. More recently, CDMA became the foundation for the newest cell phone technology, 3G Wireless. Advantages: CDMA can accommodate more users in a frequency range than other cell phone technologies. It uses less power while covering larger areas. Less likelihood of dropped calls. Disadvantages: Most CDMA technology must be licensed from Qualcomm, limiting the number of competitors offering service. Service may, at times, be inconsistent. As the number of subscribers rises, the range drops.

About 4554 days ago E-Commerce

How Entrepreneurship and Democracy Affect Internet Development

Rarely has a technology had a greater effect on the spread of the global marketplace than the emergence of the Internet. Many businesses have adapted their marketing and distribution strategies to accommodate a world of commerce that is spelled with three W’s. But doing business in other countries is not always as seamless as the click of a mouse might make it appear. The speed at which the Internet develops can vary from country to country, and this has serious implications for the way in which a company manages its e-commerce approach. Mauro F. Guillé n of the Wharton School and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and Sandra L. Suá rez of Temple University’s Department of Political Science explore the economic and structural factors that affect the growth of the Internet in different countries in their paper “Developing the Internet: Entrepreneurship and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective.” The professors analyze data on public policy as well as the conditions for entrepreneurship in 142 countries, and then take a more in-depth look at these components in Singapore, Ireland, Spain, and Argentina. “The paper essentially argues that the Internet has not diffused throughout the world in a random way, but rather that there are systematic patterns to its spread,” explains Guillé n. “We found that those systematic patterns don’t have to do with privatization or competition in the telecommunications sector, but they do have to do with entrepreneurship and with how democratic a country is. The better the conditions for entrepreneurship and the more democratic freedoms exist, the faster the Internet develops.” Guillé n and Suá rez start with the numbers. According to their research, the percentage of the population that regularly uses the Internet ranges from more than 50% in Scandinavia to less than 1% in many underdeveloped African, Central American, and South Asian countries. The number of computers linked to the Internet is also uneven, ranging from more than one for every 10 people to less than one for every 10,000. Through detailed analysis of four countries, ranging from Singapore as the most successfully wired, to Ireland, Spain and finally Argentina, where the Internet is the least developed, Guillé n and Suá rez’s paper, in part, confirms conventional wisdom. “We found that the richer the country, the greater the accessibility of the Internet,” explains Guillé n. “And the more developed the telecommunications infrastructure, the more developed the Internet.” But the authors’ conclusions regarding public policy are more surprising. Most people would likely argue that the more competitive the telecommunications environment, the lower the prices would be, leading to more widespread Internet use. but Guillé n and Suá rez discover that’s not necessarily true. The four countries studied differ in terms of the nature of public policy towards telecommunications and the Internet. Ireland and Argentina, for example, are liberal and procompetition, while Singapore and Spain have been more interventionist. Even so, Argentina is the least Internet-savvy and Singapore is the most. Internet development in Singapore, states the paper, has been very fast even though the government has implemented less-than-ideal policies. “For example, state intervention in the forms of regulation and content censorship has had detrimental effects on Internet use.” Argentina, on the other hand, has full privatization and government deregulation. But while the systematic patterns of public policy don’t always matter in the development of the Internet, Guillé n and Suá rez discover that conditions for entrepreneurship, such as the ability to raise capital and whether or not the environment is risk-free, do have a consistent effect. The country comparisons reveal that Singapore and Ireland have strong conditions for entrepreneurs, even though, especially in the case of Singapore, the state has assumed the role of leading entrepreneur. Meanwhile, the conditions for entrepreneurship in Spain and Argentina are weak. Telecom firms and other large domestic firms and business groups play a prominent role there. Guillé n and Suá rez conclude, “Internet development benefits from institutional and legal conditions favoring entrepreneurship.” Adds Guillé n: “I think this confirms conventional wisdom, but it’s still useful because nobody has demonstrated this before for a large number of countries.” Guillé n and Suá rez argue that the statistical and comparative analyses reported in their paper indicate that Internet development is “a complex phenomenon shaped not only by public policy and conditions for entrepreneurship but also by specific contingencies in each country.” More research is needed, they say, to document and interpret how the Internet has developed in different countries. Guillé n says he is already moving ahead with further research on Internet development and related issues. To start with, he is building a better database of information on the 142 countries over several years as a way to capture change in their circumstances. “I’m also looking at how specific companies go about selling their products in other countries,” Guillé n explains. “I want to understand how Internet markets develop in different parts of the world and then see how companies should react in order to be profitable.” All materials copyright © 2000 of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.