Has GSM won the technology war?

Citation

Curwen, P. (2004), "Has GSM won the technology war?", info, Vol. 6 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/info.2004.27206aab.001

Has GSM won the technology war?

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Has GSM won the technology war?

In the European Union, digital licences for mobile telephony were issued between 1992 and 1996 and utilised spectrum in the 900 MHz band (890-915 and 935-960 MHz) known as the global system for mobile (GSM). The term GSM is often also used generically in relation to spectrum in the 1,800 MHz band (1,710-1,785 and 1,805-1,880 MHz) known as a personal communications network (PCN). A crucial factor was that the European Commission enforced the exclusive usage of these two spectrum bands.

Elsewhere in the world a variety of spectrum bands are in use for 2G. However, as shown in Table I, GSM is by far the most popular technology although it may be used in alternative spectrum bands – generally the 800 MHz band (824-849 and 869-894 MHz) and/or the 1,900 MHz band (1,850-1,910 and 1,930-1,990 MHz), but also occasionally the 850 MHz band. The preference for GSM is fostered by the need to “roam” – that is, the ability of a GSM handset owner to take it to other countries where it can still be used both internally and to make international calls to other countries where GSM is in use (although a dual-band handset may be required). Given the existence of GSM throughout Western Europe, as well as its partial use in the USA, there is accordingly at the present time an obvious advantage for countries switching from analogue to digital to adopt it. However, some countries adopted one of the alternative standards to GSM before it became so well established. In particular, the US Government made no attempt to enforce a national standard, and hence three different technologies were adopted. In addition to GSM, there was widespread use of both code division multiple access (CDMA) transmitting in the 450 MHz, 800 MHz, 1,700 MHz and 1,900 MHz bands, and time division multiple access (TDMA). CDMA assigns a special electronic code to each signal and hence allows the entire frequency band to be occupied simultaneously. This is claimed to provide greater capacity, better sound quality, lower power consumption and a decreased potential for fraudulent use.

In Japan, the personal handyphone system (PHS) was introduced at an early stage to utilise a dense network of low-powered, and hence cheap, base stations when in mobile mode. PHS is roughly equivalent to the digital enhanced cordless telecommunications (DECT) standard used in Western Europe. Because of its limitations (PHS handsets cannot be used in vehicles moving at anything other than low speeds) the standard technology in Japan is increasingly personal digital cellular (PDC) which operates in the 800 MHz and 1,500 MHz bands and is incompatible with other technologies. It is also of note that, in 2002, China Telecom, despite the absence of a cellular licence, set up what is variously known as a personal access system or public access service (PAS), “Go-to-phone” service or Xiaolingtong (smart little connector or “Little Smart”) which allows mobile subscribers to switch calls to their handsets through to fixed lines, thereby avoiding the charges made to call recipients. The service only works within urban environments and is technically a fixed-wire technology (and hence omitted from Table I) because it uses fixed-wire infrastructure for its backbone, hence removing the need for a mobile licence. It had allegedly acquired 20 million subscribers by August 2003. Although PAS is incompatible with other technologies, UTStarcom is introducing a dual-mode GSM/PAS handset at the end of 2003.

GSM subscriptions reached 628 million at the end of 2001 and were recorded as 790 million by the end of 2002 – 72 per cent of the global digital total. According to the GSM Association the only countries in the world not using GSM in October 2002 were Colombia, Djibouti, Ecuador, Eritrea, Haiti, Iraq, Uruguay and Zaire. In September 2003, Djibouti became the 200th country to adopt GSM, leading the GSM Association to claim that 99.7 per cent of the world’s population lived in countries with GSM technology (Table II). Given near saturation in Western Europe and heavy inroads into Asia, it is significant that it is making inroads into Latin America and the Caribbean where, from a baseline of usage in six countries in 1998, it had been introduced in 21 countries or island territories by the end of 2002. According to the EMC World Cellular Database, there were 36 countries and 66 networks utilising GSM in this region in June 2003. In particular, it benefited from the decision by Entel Móvil in Bolivia, TelCel Radiomóvil in Mexico, Telecom Personal in Argentina and Cable & Wireless in Panama and the Caribbean to overlay their TDMA networks with GSM. This process is continuing – for example, TIM is converting its three TDMA networks in Brazil to GSM 1800 to complement its three existing GSM networks as are nine of the twelve TDMA operators overall. In Mexico, MoviStar is converting from CDMA to GSM.

For its part, the CDMA Development Group claimed at the end of December 2002[1] that CDMA was the world’s fastest-growing wireless technology, with 147 million subscribers overall (including 33 million CDMA2000 1×RTT) and 89 million subscribers in the Americas. Of the latter, 62 million were in the USA where it remained the dominant technology with 44 per cent of total subscribers: although GSM subscribers had doubled from 12.3 to 25.3 million in the USA, this was at the expense (for now at least) of AMPS and TDMA. Nevertheless, CDMA subscriptions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa accounted for only 1.5 per cent of the total and there is no reason to expect this to improve much, if at all. By end-June 2003, it was claimed that total CDMA subscribers had risen to 164 million of which 54 million used CDMA2000. Of these, 69 million were in the USA including 21 million CDMA2000 users. It should be noted that at the present time almost all CDMA2000 subscribers use 1×RTT, which is equivalent to GPRS – both tend to be called 2.5G – and GPRS is itself being overlaid on most GSM networks just as CDMA2000 1×RTT is being overlaid on CDMA (neither requires a new licence), so it is difficult to claim that one technology has gained compared to the other. What is certainly true is that CDMA2000 1×EV-DO – the 3G equivalent of W-CDMA (or UMTS) – is already making rapid inroads in South Korea and Japan because, unlike WCDMA which requires new spectrum, it uses the same spectrum as CDMA.

It is necessary to refer to China because it is currently the largest mobile market in the world. By the end of August 2003, the total number of mobile subscriptions in China had risen to 244.1 million. At present, there are only two licensed operators, the China Mobile Communications Corp. and the much smaller China United Telecommunications Corp. – both of which have listed arms in Hong Kong trading as China Mobile (HK) and China Unicom respectively. China Unicom is expanding its CDMA networks, largely at the expense of GSM subscriptions, but the vast majority will continue to use GSM for the foreseeable future.

In conclusion, the data do seem to indicate strongly that GSM has won the war of mobile technologies, although CDMA continues to put up a sturdy defence in the parts of the world where it was established early on and, in respect of 3G, is for now winning the battles. However, Western Europe in particular remains largely a CDMA desert with consequent problems of roaming. For its part, TDMA is set largely to disappear with networks overlaid predominantly with GSM.

See www.edg.org/worldwide/cdma_world_subscriber.asp

Peter Curwen Visiting Professor of Telecommunications, Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, UK.E-mail: pjcurwen@hotmail.com