when is WCDMA coming to US?

[kideeboyee]

when will WCDMA come to US and i mean when will it be fully covered?ome places get 3g in like 2months and we've been waiting for so long!

[Michael]

You are not likely to see WCDMA in the US for quite some time. The first cities to get it will probably be Portland, Seattle, Houston, Austin, San Jose, and San Francisco - as these have been announced by Cingular and AT&T as being some of their planned test markets.

Either way, I don't think you will see them any time in the next 6 months. But I would love to be wrong.

[Sid]

Originally posted by kideeboyee
some places get 3g in like 2months and we've been waiting for so long!

Australia, the UK, Italy and other countries have had 3G services for a while now (and don't forget about Japan). My experience with 3G is that, while the network is good, the handsets are just not up to par. It's good in some sense that by the time the US will get WCDMA, we should see some decent 3G handsets (like the SE Z1010 and Samsung Z100) on the market.

[kangfu]

Anybody had experience with Teltra's CDMA 2000? (Mobile Loop)

It seems that the 3G network isnt doing as well as hoped, so maybe Telstras revamped CDMA was actually the way to go?

Being an Optus fanboy though, i think all CDMA is pretty crappy. :p

[Michael]

CDMA is the better technology in my not so humble opinion.

GSM's SIM card made the service more marketable, but it is based on older and less efficient technology (TDMA).

I would prefer to have seen the GSM world choose CDMA2000 as their 3G upgrade path instead of WCDMA (which is still CDMA, just not compatible with CDMA2000).

[Fribblesworth]

You can't just say that since 3G WCDMA isn't working aswell that people should instead utilise TELSTRA 2000 CDMA, that's just EDGE and is essentially 2.75G. From a technical perspective, 3G isn't an avenue, it's the next logical step. Almost everyone I know in Sydney either has a 3G handset or is intending to once their current contract expires. Just like anything it will just take time to work. 2000 is just for customers to take advantage of using the existing metro CDMA towers for business people.

Well, so far as I know.

[Sid]

Originally posted by Fribblesworth
You can't just say that since 3G WCDMA isn't working aswell that people should instead utilise TELSTRA 2000 CDMA, that's just EDGE and is essentially 2.75G. From a technical perspective, 3G isn't an avenue, it's the next logical step. Almost everyone I know in Sydney either has a 3G handset or is intending to once their current contract expires. Just like anything it will just take time to work. 2000 is just for customers to take advantage of using the existing metro CDMA towers for business people.

Well, so far as I know.

CDMA 2000 and EDGE are completely different things. EDGE is a speed booster for GSM and CDMA 2000 is a speed booster for CDMA networks.

Your friends are a minority. Among the dodgy handsets, poor coverage and bad customer support, the only thing that 3 has going for it is its cheap rates. Most people I know who are on 3 are leaving it and going back to Optus and Telstra.

[Fribblesworth]

Sorry my bad about EDGE, I knew what I meant :-)

That's interesting about going back on 3. While BETA tapes were supposedly superior to VHS, it was all the marketing of VHS that got it established as THE form of tape. We'll have to see whether or not 3G is marketted well enough to make it the next step. It's doing great in Japan, with 90% country coverage so far. And they aren't looking back. Worse comes to worse, I'll jsut move to Japan. Good thing I know Japanese :-)

[jim]

Originally posted by Fribblesworth
Almost everyone I know in Sydney either has a 3G handset or is intending to once their current contract expires.

I also have a lot of friends in Melbourne who have switched to or are planning to switch to 3, but the main if not only reason they have switched is because they use their phones a lot & 3 caps voice call rates to $99 a month.

As for video calls the picture isn't smooth flowing and the sound comes out a couple of seconds before the lips move this would be amusing in the begining but would soon turn to annoying.

So the only 2 reasons a lot of people would use the video call feature are
1) In the beginning because it's a "cool" new feature they play with & show their friends & family
2) Later on only so they can use up the $32 worth of video call credits a month that 3 gives them that they can't use on anything else

[srchurch]

It sounds like until W-CDMA is fully rolled out, GSM operators are starting to add data services with EDGE. Does anyone know much about EDGE roll out in America? I have seen some press releases on ATT and Cingular rolling it out (google search). No news could be found about T-Mobile. SonyEricson is releasing a 850Mhz/1900Mhz EDGE modem card for a laptop around now. That is all I know.

Also, if operators seem to be adding EDGE services, why do so few phones support it. Esp the new Nokia 6600 that many people are looking forward to.

Basiclly I have no land line, but would like to use my phone as a modem. I am going to try this with GPRS soon.

[AL9999]

Originally posted by Fribblesworth
Sorry my bad about EDGE, I knew what I meant :-)

That's interesting about going back on 3. While BETA tapes were supposedly superior to VHS, it was all the marketing of VHS that got it established as THE form of tape. We'll have to see whether or not 3G is marketted well enough to make it the next step. It's doing great in Japan, with 90% country coverage so far. And they aren't looking back. Worse comes to worse, I'll jsut move to Japan. Good thing I know Japanese :-)

Forgive me, I'm going to have to correct you on a couple of things. =)

Beta tapes were superior to VHS, but Sony had a crazy, very expensive licensing scheme that saw many potential users of the tape system stay very far away and use VHS, which is why VHS took off. It wasn't the marketing, but simply the fact that Beta was too expensive to make use of.

As for 3G in Japan, up until now it's actually been received quite badly. FOMA handsets had (and still do, to an extent) the same problems we are experiencing right now with 3G handsets, that is, short battery life, bad reception, and the fact that they're large and bulky. Only recently have they been taking care of these issues, although their battery life still leaves something to be desired compared to 2G PDC handsets. At the moment, FOMA have around 1.3 million subscribers (http://mobilemediajapan.com/). Considering that they've been running since the end of 2001, that isn't exactly something phenomenal. Most of the subscribers in Japan are still on 2G... so in a sense they're not looking forward. =P

The only 3G operator in Japan doing well are KDDI/au, and that's on a CDMA2000 1x network which barely qualifies as being 3G (144kbps, just over the data speed needed =P). Although, from Nov 28 it will be an EV-DO network, hence becoming true 3G (capable of 2.4mbps transfer).

[Sid]

Originally posted by AL9999
The only 3G operator in Japan doing well are KDDI/au, and that's on a CDMA2000 1x network

What about DoCoMo?

[AL9999]

Originally posted by Sid
What about DoCoMo?

Sorry, I was talking about DoCoMo when I was referring to FOMA. That's the name of their 3G service.

Comparatively, they're doing much better than Three in the UK or Australia, but when they started they were reputedly just as bad as them. They've improved now that they have better coverage, but their handsets are still undesirable in the view of most Japanese, mainly because of handset battery life.

au are technically doing better than DoCoMo because of the figures. They have 10.5 million subscribers on their CDMA2000 1x network, compared to 1.3 million on DoCoMo's network. Of course that's all just figures, and I still don't like to think of 1x as 3G as 144kbps is not all that fast (an improvement on 9.6kbps though, granted). Plus the fact that 1x was easily overlaid on cdmaOne, allowed them to achieve so many subscribers so quickly (after 1x was introduced, all handsets released from that point on were 1x compatible, so all new subscribers or anyone who upgraded their handset, would be counted as a 3G subscriber), whereas W-CDMA is a completely different system, and requires more than a simple upgrade.

[14charusername]

Does NTT DoCoMo's PDC system time divide or code divide to multiplex?

I wonder why someone didn't figure out how to put a SIM in a CDMA phone. CDMA (and old school TDMA) phones activate by using an ID number burned in somewhere on the phone (an ESN). The obvious kludge is to make a CDMA phone that takes a SIM and then uses the industry standard information on the SIM and some formula to report a unique ESN to the network. Another solution would be to have standard GSM and CDMA phone identification schemes running side by side on the same CDMA network. Presumably the ID data looks different (i.e. differnet types, different lengths, etc.) so the network could differentiate easily.

The former scheme would probably run into problems translating a GSM identification scheme into an ESN by a formula. The SIM cards for CDMA phones would probably have to have both GSM style ID (if you were to use the SIM to roam on a GSM network with a GSM phone) and an ESN encoded somehow into a space in the SIM where all CDMA SIM phones would know to look for the ESN. Perhaps CDMA SIMs would need to be manufactured with a few bytes of ROM replacing some user memory address to contain the ESN to prevent cloning. Othewise the ESN would need to be stored in some otherwise empty part of SIM ROM.

[shenny4uall]

I stand to be corrected, but first I would like to attempt to correct something here. I believe GSM is based on the CDMA technology, rather than TDMA. Any thoughts on this?