Telus To Shutter CDMA Service On January 31, 2017 (mobilesyrup.com) 42
An anonymous reader writes: With most Canadian mobile devices on some form of HSPA+ or LTE network, you don't hear mention of CDMA that often anymore. And for good reason; carriers like Telus, which still maintain their CDMA network for legacy customers, plan to mothball the tech over the next few years. We now have a definitive date when Telus customers will no longer be able to use their old CDMA device. Over the weekend, the company sent text messages stating, "CDMA service ends January 31, 2017. Move to our 4G network with great offers."
When can we disable 2G everywhere? (Score:1, Informative)
Seriously, get rid of 2G and improve privacy. Without 2G, privacy-invading devices like stingrays won't work any longer. Plus it will free up the bandwidth for more efficient uses.
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Re:When can we disable 2G everywhere? (Score:4, Informative)
Most everyone is moving to LTE, not GSM. In any case, you don't hear much about GSM Stingrays because the entire GSM security model was holed YEARS ago so there was far less need to go to extremes to do GSM intercepts. They cheesey GSM encryption method has a variety of weaknesses and anyone inclined to do GSM intercepts can do so quite easily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] The gear needed is basically a laptop and some innocent-looking antennas. It fits in a briefcase.
Since the iPhone was GSM-only for a long time, I would be shocked if Apple's competitors had not setup GSM intercept stations around the Apple campus and done wholesale capture for perhaps years at a time. Hell it can be done from three blocks away and nobody would even suspect a thing.
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No, LTE is really a jacked up version of CDMA. Its known as WCDMA with W for Wide Band.
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Technically, LTE goes a different rout than (W)CDMA.
(W)CDMA means several transmitters sending on the same frequency at the same time, using different modulation codes. From the sum signal, a receiver can pick out each transmitter's signal by correlating with the transmitter's code.
On LTE, transmitters never send on the same frequency at the same time. They always use separate frequencies and/or different time slots.
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And about 2 minutes after I posted this, I realised my error. You're right. UMTS/HSPA is WDCMA.
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No, LTE is a development from GSM and UMTS. They're all developed by the 3GPP.
What they're talking about is equipment based on the old CDMAone/CDMA2000 standards (1X, EV-DO, etc.), which were competitors to GSM and UMTS developed by 3GPP2 (which had nothing to do with 3GPP beyond both developing 3G network standards).
The latter stuff got used a fair bit in Canada due to being better suited to rural environments, as at the time, GSM had that 35km cell limit.
But now that problem is ancient history and everyt
SHITTY ASS MODERATION (Score:1)
Shame on whoever modded the OP to -1. The present generation of stingrays jams 4g and 3g signals, then presents a fake 2g tower. The lack of security in 2g means that phones will connect to the fake tower. Their position can then be triangulated. Furthermore, the lack of security in 2g makes it particularly easy to intercept any communications. While the Hailstorm upgrades may enable location tracking once 2g is gone, it's expensive to upgrade and hopefully will be prohibitive at least in some places. Anyth
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A pity any criminal worth anything will just disable 2G in their phone (or, if they're trying even remotely, use an encrypted VoIP app). Not a law enforcement tool but for surveillance, ofc...
Re: SHITTY ASS MODERATION (Score:1)
It won't help with surveillance of criminals. Innocent people who don't take those steps are still vulnerable. And that's the problem; criminals have a number of tools at their disposal that innocent people are unlikely to use. From the standpoint of criminals, why not simply use burner phones anyway, so law enforcement won't know which phones to track?
Re:Die Qualcomm, die! (Score:4, Informative)
Awful technology, CDMA.
CDMA technology is a fundamental method of communication used in a huge range of different platforms, from GPS, HDTV to broadband internet to various wireless formats. A lot of the gadgets and things we use every day rely upon CDMA to work.
You can bash the cellular product marketed as CDMA all you want. It's a big fat target. Go for it.
But the technology that name is more than just a cellular platform. CDMA is more useful than you imagine.
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True, but perhaps beside the point. By "CDMA network", the featured article probably means the CDMA2000 platform, and I guess Anonymous Coward was referring to CDMA2000 as well.
My gripe with CDMA2000 is that U.S. deployments, instead of using a CSIM, prefer to program the subscriber identity directly into the phone.
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CDMA is useful, but this is about the CDMAone/CDMA2000 network standards, which are ancient and useless.
CDMA is alive and well (Score:5, Interesting)
See, the original GSM spec used TDMA - basically each phone is assigned a timeslice and all phones take turns talking with the tower. This meant that even if the phone didn't have much data to transmit or didn't need to send any data at all, it still used a full timeslice. Couple that with time buffers to account for phones being different distances from the tower, and GSM ends up wasting a lot of bandwidth. CDMA allows all phones to transmit at the same time. The tower tells them apart by assigning an orthogonal code to each phone. Bandwidth scales automatically between phones because each phone sees the other phones' transmissions as noise, thus reducing the signal to noise ratio and reducing bandwidth. If a phone doesn't need data for a few seconds, the noise decreases, the SNR for the other phones increases, and that extra bandwidth is immediately available for all the other phones to use.
This is why CDMA carriers got 3G about a year before GSM carriers. Their towers could already provide 3G data speeds. GSM had to amend the GSM spec to specify CDMA and wideband CDMA data services, then wait for handset manufacturers and carriers to implement it. This is also why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time. They had two separate radios - a TDMA radio for voice, a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single radio which could be used for voice or data, but not both at the same time.
Most implementations of LTE use OFDMA. It does the same thing as CDMA, except using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA served as the proof of concept for widescale simultaneous orthogonal transmissions, so without it LTE probably would not exist or would not be as mature ias it is today. (OFDMA requires more processing power than CDMA, which is why it came later. WiMax used OFDMA, and my Galaxy S phone which used it would die after 3-4 hours on WiMax vs 8-12 hours on 3G CDMA.)
If the U.S. had followed the rest of the world in adopting GSM and had prohibited CDMA, our mobile data speeds today would probably be around 100-500 kbps. So be glad CDMA won, even if Qualcomm is evil.
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So many technical errors in this it should be deleted.
CDMA also didn't win any race, except for being patent encumbered that is. CDMA is seeing sunset well before GSM will be switched off.
By "CDMA" do you mean the concept of "code-division multiple access" or do you mean the cdmaONE/CDMA2000 mobile phone technologies from Qualcomm, both of which use code-division multiple access, but aren't the only mobile phone technologies that do so, either.
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Except this news isn't about CDMA. It's about CDMA2000, incompatible with both GSM/UMTS/W-CDMA/HSPA.
Telus will still run its UMTS/HSPA as well as LTE networks. It will shutdown its CDMA2000 service.
Re: CDMA is alive and well (Score:2)
GSM TDMA (Score:2)
TDMA was indeed part of the original GSM design, and CDMA was far more efficient - better coverage with fewer towers. Later revisions added CDMA and later technologies to GSM.
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CDMA won the GSM vs. CDMA war.
Wait what?
There was no CDMA vs. GSM "war". The actual radio interface is only a small part of the whole technology (e.g. the SIM, the concept of "roaming" was built into the ETSI specs from the very beginning, ETSI was also years ahead with concepts of real time billing and prepaid). Whilst Qualcomm CDMA was ahead at the radio interface for a short period of time, the ITU/ETSI side quickly caught up and passed the tech for Qualcomm "CDMA"
The real war was between "proprietary" specifications which came out o
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This isn't 3G, 3G is still alive and well, it's the even older technology that is being turned off. About the only people still using it are companies using the "push to talk" service that TELUS marketed as "Mike", and they've all been given transition paths to LTE push to talk apps, or off cellular all together (for example Alberta Health Services EMS used Mike phones, and they are in the process of transitioning to the new Alberta First Responder Radio Communication System (AFRRCS))
The TELUS network has 3
Double win for provider (Score:3)
At first, CDMA could cover more area (Score:2)
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The other thing to note is that the CDMA providers in the US and Canada were also the incumbents. The reason why they could reach further and and wider was because the had the largest chunk of the good spectrum (sub 1Ghz). Verizon started out with the 800/950 spectrum and Sprint/Nextel had 700Mhz pretty much locked up. AT&T, T-Mobile and others started with 1700/1800/1900/2100 and had to deploy more antennas with more juice to get similar coverage. The cell standard didn't have much to do with this
Text Message?? (Score:2)
Awfully close to AT&T's 2G shutdown (Score:2)