1. The Wireless Industry
Caroline Simard
Com 137/237

2. History (http://www.privateline.com/PCS/history4.htm)
The Photophone, 1880
An early attempt!
1888: discovery by
Heinrich Hertz that electricity
travels in waves through the
atmosphere
Marconi – development
of radio and telegraph
This device transmitted voice over a light beam. A person's voice projected through a glass test tube toward a thin mirror which acted as a transmitter. Acoustical vibrations caused by the voice produced like or sympathetic vibrations in the mirror.
Sunlight was directed onto the mirror, where the vibrations were captured by a parabolic dish. The dish focused the light on a photo-sensitive selenium cell, in circuit with a telephone. The electrical resistance of the selenium changed as the strength of the received light changed, varying the current flowing through the circuit. The telephone's receiver then changed these flucuating currents into speech.
Although not related to the mobile telephony of today, Bell's experimenting was a first.
Starting in 1894 with his first electrical experiments, and continuing until 1901 when his radio telegraph system sent signals across the Atlantic ocean, Marconi preserved against every kind of discouragement and deserves lionizing for making radio something reliable and useful.

3. History (cont)
Marconi’s wireless telegraph, 1901 and Ericsson’s car telephone
Ships were the first wireless mobile platforms. In 1901 Marconi placed a radio aboard a Thornycroft steam powered truck, thus producing the first land based wireless mobile. (Transmitting data, of course, and not voice.) Arthur C. Clarke says the vehicle's cylindrical antenna was lowered to a horizontal position before the the wagon began moving. Marconi never envisioned his system broadcasting voices, he always thought of radio as a wireless telegraph.
Ericsson’s car phone -- first regularly occurring, authorized, civilian use of a mobile telephone

4. History Mobile radios, 1920s Voice radio telephone, Bell Labs, 1924
1920s – Police departments experiment with mobile radio receivers in cars.
inventing the first version of a mobile, two way, voice based radio telephone in 1924

5. History (cont) 1927 Radio Act: Spectrum regulated
ATT 1946 mobile radio service
Cellular Bell Lab invention DH Ring
Monopoly context
In 1934 the United States Congress created the Federal Communications Commission. In addition to regulating landline telephone business, they also began managing the radio spectrum. The federal government gave the F.C.C. a broad public interest mandate, telling it to grant licenses if it was in the "public interest, convenience, and necessity" to do so. The FCC would now decide who would get what frequencies.
ATT had experimented in 1946 with mobile telephony – first mobile radio service in 1946 in St. Louis.
The Bell System – slow to push wireless. Anything AT&T produced had to work reliably with the rest of their network – also no competition incentives, no economic incentives to invest in wireless. Frequency availability was in turn controlled by the Federal Communications Commission, making it a slow process – Also there was this sense in the FCC that ATT’s powers should not be extended.
On June 17, 1946 in Saint Louis, Missouri, AT&T and Southwestern Bell introduced the first American commercial mobile radio-telephone service to private customers. Mobiles used newly issued vehicle radio-telephone licenses granted to Southwestern Bell by the FCC. They operated on six channels in the 150 MHz band with a 60 kHz channel spacing. [Peterson] Bad cross channel interference, something like cross talk in a landline phone, soon forced Bell to use only three channels. In a rare exception to Bell System practice, subscribers could buy their own radio sets and not AT&T's equipment.
Shortly after this cartoon appeared the July 1948 BLR reported that a taxi cab driver with a mobile phone reported a stuck car on a railroad crossing, thus saving the broken down car and its motorist from disaster. Possibly the first radio-telephone rescue of its kind.

6. History 1950s – little mobile radio R&D  spectrum policy
1964 – AT&T introduces IMTS
1967 – NTT proposes nation wide cellular phone system for Japan
1967 – Nokia group formed
Bell Labs patent for cellular tech approved – 6 year delay before the FCC lets ATT trial
In1958 the Bell System petitioned the FCC to grant 75 MHz worth of spectrum to radio-telephones in the 800 MHz band. The FCC had not yet allowed any channels below 500MHz, where there was not enough continuous spectrum to develop an efficient radio system. Despite the Bell System's forward thinking, the FCC sat on this proposal for ten years and only considered it in 1968 when requests for more frequencies became so backlogged that they could not ignore them.
"Because it appeared that sufficient frequencies would not be allocated for mobile radio, the 1950s saw only low level R&D activity related to cellular systems.
In 1964 the Bell System began introducing Improved Mobile Telephone Service or IMTS, a replacement to the badly aging Mobile Telephone System. The IMTS field test was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, from Improved Telephone Service worked full-duplex so people didn't have to press a button to talk. Talk went back and forth just like a regular telephone. It finally permitted direct dialing, automatic channel selection and reduced bandwidth to kHz.
Across the ocean the Japanese were operating conventional mobile radio telephones and looking forward to the future as well. Limited frequencies did not permit individuals to own radio-telephones, only government and institutions, and so there was a great demand by the public. It is my understanding that in 1967 the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company proposed a nationwide cellular system at 800Mhz for Japan. This proposal is supposedly contained in NTTs' Electrical Communications Laboratories Technical Journal Volume 16, No. 5, a 23 page article entitled "Fundamental problems of nation-wide mobile radio telephone system," written by K. Araki. I have not yet seen the English version of the NTT Journal in question, but it does agree with material I will go over later in this article.
What is certain is that every major telecommunications company and manufacturer knew about the cellular idea by the middle 1960s; the key questions then became which company could make the concept work, technically and economically, and who might patent a system first.
In 1967 the Nokia group was formed by consolidating two companies: the Finnish Rubber Works and the Finnish Cable Works. Finnish Cable Works had an electronics division which Nokia expanded to include semi-conductor research. These early 1970s studies readied Nokia to develop digital landline telephone switches. Also helping the Finns was a free market for telecom equipment, an open economic climate which promoted creativity and competitiveness. Unlike most European countries, the state run Post, Telephone and Telegraph Administration was not required to buy equipment from a Finnish company. And other telephone companies existed in the country, any of whom could decide on their own which supplier they would buy from. Nokia's later cellular development was greatly helped by this free market background and their early research.
Back in the United States, the FCC in 1968 took up the Bell System's now ten year old request for more frequencies. They made a tentative decision in 1970 to do so, asked AT&T to comment, and received the system's technical report in December, The Bell System submitted docket 19262, outlining a cellular radio scheme based on frequency-reuse. Their docket was in turn based on the patent Amos E. Joel, Jr. and Bell Telephone Laboratories filed on December 21, 1970 for a mobile communication system. This patent was approved on May 16, 1972 and given the United States patent number 3,663,762. Six more years would pass before the FCC allowed AT&T to start a trial. This delay deserves some explaining.

7. Regulatory and competitive pressures for cellular emergence
Radio-telephony – fight from the radio common carriers
Push for equal access competition
ATT trial approval
Besides bureaucratic sloth, this delay was also caused, rightly enough, by the radio common carriers. These private companies provided conventional wireless telephone service in competition with AT&T. Carriers like the American Radio Telephone Service, and suppliers to them like Motorola, feared the Bell System would dominate cellular radio if private companies weren't allowed to compete equally. They wanted the FCC to design open market rules, and they fought constantly in court and in administrative hearings to make sure they had equal access. And although its rollout was delayed, the Bell System was already working with cellular radio, in a small but ingenious way.
After the 1975 trial approval the Bell System put out to bid a contract for 135 cell phones, which they'd use in their upcoming trial in Chicago, Illinois. Competing for that work were five American companies, including E.F. Johnson and Motorola. And also one Japanese company, Oki Electric (external link). The contract went to Oki for $500,000, drawing bitter complaints from the losing bidders and intensifying the rancor between AT&T, now the largest company on earth, and its much smaller rivals. The contract might seem small but in today's dollars it actually works out to $1,598,513. [Calculations] And it points to a more complex problem of the time.
Since 1968 Motorola was thought to have spent $13 million dollars ($41,561,338 in Year 2000 figures) on cellular research and development, this cost borne by them alone. Their losing $2 million dollar bid ($6, 394,052, converted, an astounding $47,000 a phone) reflected some of that expense. Joseph Miller, General Manager of Motorola's Communication Division, said that, by comparison, Oki's bid represented "no inclusion of R&D costs whatsoever because these have in effect been subsidized by the Japanese government." Although this was true, it was equally true that unlike American firms, Japan had no defense or space work to spin technology off from. But Miller went further when he said that "Japanese manufacturers, with the financial assistance of their government are now developing systems for their domestic market, but with the clear intent to invade the U.S. market." [Business Week1] One disappointed bidder maintained that by accepting their bid AT&T was further subsiding Oki, and damaging American companies and competition. These were not just idle complaints.

8. Cellular
All analog and digital mobiles use a network of base stations and antennas to cover a large area. The area a base station covers is called a cell, the spot where the base station and antennas are located is called a cell site. Viewed on a diagram, the small territory covered by each base station appears like a cell in a honeycomb, hence the name cellular. Cell sizes range from sixth tenths of a mile to thirty miles in radius for cellular (1km to 50km). GSM and PCS use much smaller cells, no more than 6 miles (10km) across. A large carrier may use hundreds of cells.
Each cell site's radio base station uses a computerized 800 or 1900 megahertz transceiver with an antenna to provide coverage. Each base station uses carefully chosen frequencies to reduce interference with neighboring cells. Narrowly directed sites cover tunnels, subways and specific roadways. The area served depends on topography, population, and traffic. In some PCS and GSM systems, a base station hierarchy exists, with pico cells covering building interiors, microcells covering selected outdoor areas, and macrocells providing more extensive coverage to wider areas. See the Ericsson diagram below.
The macro cell controls the cells overlaid beneath it. A macro cell often built first to provide coverage and smaller cells built to provide capacity.
The heart and soul of cellular is frequency reuse. The same frequency sets are used and reused systematically throughout a carrier's coverage area. If you have frequency reuse you have cellular. If you don't, well, you don't have cellular. Frequency reuse distinguishes cellular from conventional mobile telephone service, where only a few frequencies are used over a large area, with many customer's competing to use the same channels. Much like a taxi dispatch operation, older style radio telephone service depended on a high powered, centrally located transmitter which paged or called mobiles on just a few frequencies.
Cellular instead relies on a distributed network of cells, each cell site with its own antenna and radio equipment, using low power to communicate with the mobile. In each cell the same frequency sets are used as in other cells. But the cells with those same frequencies are spaced many miles apart to reduce interference. Thus, in a 21 cell system a single frequency may be used several times. The lone, important exception to this are CDMA systems which we will cover later. In those, the same frequencies are used by every cell.
Each base station, in addition, controls a mobile's power output, keeping it low enough to complete a circuit while not high enough to skip over to another cell.

9. Cellular (2)
Higher frequency  equipment more costly but smaller antennas
More subject to blocking but penetrate walls more easily
Best for urban areas where building penetration and high levels of frequency reuse necessary
Lower frequency
Better for covering wide areas where frequency reuse is not as important

10. The impact of the breakup
1982/1984 – ATT Breakup – liberalization trend
Cellular allocated to RBOCs – split of markets
Only Pacific Telesis – Airtouch pursues cellular (spinoff)
The Bell System built and operated the best landline telephone service in the world. It served most medium and large sized cities in America, being the telephone company to at least 80% of the United States population. Acting under the largess of a state approved monopoly it built a research and development arm far bigger than any private company like Motorola could ever afford.
Although it had half-heartedly competed with the Radio Common Carriers for conventional mobile telephone service, it was never truly interested in land mobile because too few subscribers were permitted with the limited frequencies available.
In the decision reached, AT&T kept their long distance service, Western Electric, Bell Labs, the newly formed AT&T Technologies and AT&T Consumer Products. AT&T got their most profitable companies, in other words, and spun off their regional Bell Operating Companies or RBOCs.
1987: Cable company – McCaw Communications enter cell markets
Sells to ATT in 1993
McCaw builds cell network in the licensed territories – secondary market phenomenon – bought licenses from MCI and others.
Sells to ATT for 11.5 billion

11. Standard Evolution 1981 – Nordic Mobile Telephone Service
First multinational cell system
GSM – digital standard – effort of national PTTs
1990s TDMA in US
Telecom deregulation trends worldwide and increased competition
Europe saw cellular service introduced in 1981, when the Nordic Mobile Telephone System or NMT450 began operating in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway in the 450 MHz range. It was the first multinational cellular system. In 1985 Great Britain started using the Total Access Communications System or TACS at 900 MHz. Later, the West German C-Netz, the French Radiocom 2000, and the Italian RTMI/RTMS helped make up Europe's nine analog incompatible radio telephone systems. Plans were afoot during the early 1980s, however, to create a single European wide digital mobile service with advanced features and easy roaming. While North American groups concentrated on building out their robust but increasingly fraud plagued and featureless analog network, Europe planned for a digital future.
The United States suffered no variety of incompatible systems. Roaming from one city or state to another wasn't difficult like in Europe. Little desire existed to design an all digital system when the present one was working well and proving popular. To illustrate that point, the American cellular phone industry grew from less than 204,000 subscribers in 1985 to 1,600,000 in And with each analog based phone sold, chances dimmed for an all digital future. To keep those phones working (and producing money for the carriers) any technological system advance would have to accommodate them.
Europeans saw things differently. No new telephone system could accommodate their existing services on so many frequencies. They decided instead to start a new technology in a new radio band. Cellular structured but fully digital, the new service would incorporate the best thinking of the time. They patterned their new wireless standard after landline requirements for ISDN, hoping to make a wireless counterpart to it. The new service was called GSM (external link).
GSM development began in 1982 by a group of 26 European national phone companies. GSMWorld (external link) This Conference of European Postal and Telecommunications Administrations or CEPT (external link), sought to build a uniform, European wide cellular system around 900 MHz. A rare triumph of European unity, GSM achievements became "one of the most convincing demonstrations of what co-operation throughout European industry can achieve on the global market." Planning began in earnest and continued for several years.
In 1989 The European Telecommunication Standards Institute or ETSI (external link) took responsibility for further developing GSM. In 1990 the first recommendations were published. Pre-dating American PCS, the United Kingdom asked for and got a GSM plan for higher frequencies. The Digital Cellular System or DCS1800 works at 1.8 GHz, uses lower powered base stations and has greater capacity because more frequencies are available than on the continent. Aside from these "air interface" considerations, the system is pure GSM. The specs were published in 1991.
In 1990 North American carriers faced the question -- how do we increase capacity? -- do we pick an analog or digital method? The answer was digital. In March, 1990 the North American cellular network incorporated the IS-54B standard, the first North American dual mode digital cellular standard. This standard won over Motorola's Narrowband AMPS or NAMPS, an analog scheme that increased capacity by cutting down voice channels from 30KHz to 10KHz. IS-54 on the other hand increased capacity by digital means: sampling, digitizing, and then multiplexing conversations, a technique called TDMA or time division multiple access. This method separates calls by time, placing parts of individual conversations on the same frequency, one after the next. It tripled call capacity
We come to the early 1990s. Cellular telephone deployment is now world wide, but development remains concentrated in three areas: Scandinavia, the United States, and Japan. Telecom deregulation is occurring across the globe and the private market is offering a wide variety of wireless services. The leading technology in America is now IS-54 while GSM dominates in Europe and many other countries. Japan goes a slightly different direction, with Japanese Digital Cellular (or Personal Digital Cellular) in 1991 and the Personal Handyphone System in These early digital schemes all use time division multiple access or TDMA. Over the coming years many carriers will replace TDMA with CDMA to increase call capacity, while retaining the same service.

12. An industry driven by standards
Standard evolution and path dependence:
AMPS – 1st Generation
AT&T and Motorola trials in 1979
GSM + TDMA – 2nd Generation (and 2.5G)
TDMA – improvement over AMPS – path dependence
GSM – governmental and industry effort, 1987
CDMA … in various flavors – 2.5 and 3 G
A US driven effort (Qualcomm)
3G wars
AMPS, the Advanced Mobile Phone System, was introduced following successful trials by AT&T and Motorola in 1979 {Goodman, 1998 #501}. This standard became the basis of first-generation cellular systems.
Different industry standards specify everything from film roll speed to electrical outlet shapes. Most standards are voluntary but everything works better if manufacturers agree on them. Rather than specifying the construction, size, or shape of cellular equipment, cellular standards more often mandate a process, they dictate how a system works. Many rule making groups produce standards.
TIA (external link) Telecommunication Industry Association, a group accredited by the larger American National Standards Institute or ANSI (external link).
The TIA, along with the Committee of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions or ATIS (external link) , develop North American wireless standards. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute or ETSI (external link) develops European standards.
Cellular standards set rules that mobiles, base stations, mobile switches, cellular databases, and other network elements follow to communicate with each other.
TDMA (Time division. multiple access) is a standard which has emerged as an improvement of AMPS. It increases channel capacity by 3 to 6 times when compared to AMPS (Curran, 1996). It cuts a communication channel into time slots, and data is sent through the channel in bursts {Forbes, 1995 #10}. Hence, 3 to 6 phone calls can be handled by the same channel at the same time (Keller, 1994). TDMA carriers are slowly moving to CDMA for 3G, opting for 2.5G solutions with a UMTS (GSM) overlay in the meantime (Harter, 2001).
GSM is based on the same signaling method as TDMA (Curran, 1996), using time division. A planned governmental and industry effort initiated in 1987 {Goodman, 1998 #501} and commercialized in 1991 (Lynch, 2001), it largely dominated second generation cellular. Despite the move toward 3G, which will be dominated by the CDMA standard, the GSM standard is still benefiting from early critical mass adoption (Wilde, 2001). Indeed, in 2001, more than 400 GSM networks were operating in 162 countries (Lynch, 2001). Furthermore, some major American carriers (AT&T and Cingular) have dropped CDMA in favor of GSM (Berman, Harris, & Tam, 2001). GSM’s network externalities still make it an attractive standard for companies.
CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) spreads information transmission across a wide bandwidth, and is therefore labeled a “spread spectrum technology” (CDMA Development Group). (See Viterbi book on CDMA). It can use from all of available spectrum at any time, dividing messages by code (rather than frequency), and sending different parts of the message to different available spectrum. The receiving device then recognizes the code and de-spreads the parts of the message (Anonymous, 1995), while a message which is not intended for another receiver just looks like noise to it. Qualcomm holds patents on the algorithms used in CDMA systems for cellular. CDMA is presented as a more efficient spectrum-use standard, enabling cellular operators to use the limited spectrum allocated to them by the FCC more efficiently. The CDMA principle itself is not new, as it was used in the 1950s by military technology (Lynch, 2001) which had evolved out of the FDMA (frequency division multiple access) principle.{Hazlett, 2001 #514}. At the cellular CDMA standard inception in 1989, after the TDMA standard was widely adopted in the US, the new technology was causing much hype, with CDMA backers suggesting that the standard was 40 times more efficient as AMPS and 14 times more efficient than TDMA and GSM(Curran, 1996; Hardy, 1996; Keller, 1994). However, the new standard was late in its implementation and Qualcomm was criticized for creating a deeper lag in the US cellular market compared to the European market (Hardy, 1996). Despite the criticisms, by 1998 major players were adopting the CDMA standard for their next-generation systems (Korea in 1996, China, Japan and the US, along with Latin America, being the most important ones) (Brodsky, 1998). European companies are also migrating from the widely adopted GSM to CDMA for 3G devices (Brodsky, 1998; Shankar & McClelland, 1997), following an agreement between Qualcomm and Ericsson.
Qualcomm looked poised to reap huge benefits from the adoption of CDMA by key countries such as Korea, and from the ITU’s move toward a decision on which standard would replace GSM and TDMA, with most proposals pointing to CDMA (Lynch, 2001). However, cellular vendors were resistant to be locked-in paying Qualcomm’s 8% licensing fee, and many of them (Nokia, Ericsson, and Alcatel) started to develop their own version of CDMA, hoping to file their own patents for a version that would be different enough from the original (Lynch, 2001). They called their version W-CDMA at first, and then named it UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecom Systems) and 3GSM (Lynch, 2001; Paakkolanvaara, 2001). Other companies invented their own CDMA, such as Siemens with Time Division Synchronous CDMA. The dynamics of path-dependence might have played a role in the emergence of W-CDMA as well, as companies argued that it the evolution from GSM to W-CDMA was easier than to CDMA (Luna, 2001b). Some American companies, such as Cingular and AT&T, adopted UMTS over CDMA (Berman et al., 2001; Lynch, 2001), while Verizon and Sprint kept CDMA (Berman et al., 2001). Qualcomm’s stock value significantly declined (Lynch, 2001). Qualcomm is claiming intellectual property rights over W-CDMA, with some W-CDMA adopters agreeing to pay royalty fees and others, such as Nokia, saying that Qualcomm has no IP rights over W-CDMA (Lynch, 2001).

13. Adoption and spectrum scarcity
Mid 1990s spectrum for PCS auctioned
More spectrum still needed for 3G
By the mid-1990s even more wireless channels were needed in America. Existing cellular bands had no more room. New services and many more frequencies were needed to handle all the customers. So a new block of frequencies. much higher in the radio spectrum, was licensed for wireless use. After much study the FCC began auctioning spectrum in the newly designated PCS band, from December 5, 1994 to January 14, [The FCC (external link)] A convoluted set of rules resulted in several carriers being licensed in each metropolitan area. The FCC at first thought this new competition to conventional cellular would lower rates overall. While competition was stimulated, lower prices did not occur. In many areas conventional cellular is now cheaper than PCS.
PCS or Personal Communication Services were all digital, using TDMA routines and also code division multiple access or CDMA. These were IS-136 and IS-95, respectively. The most notable offering was European GSM, brought to America at a higher frequency and sometimes dubbed PCS1900. It uses TDMA. The evolution of IS-54, IS-136, came into being shortly after these new spectrum blocks were opened up. Today some carriers use both 900 MHz and 1900 MHz spectrum in a single area, putting a mobile call on whatever band is best at the time.
As we look toward the future the demand for new mobile wireless services seems unlimited, especially with the mobile internet upon us. Existing voice oriented systems will continue and be updated. New systems such as 3G will arrive in America once additional spectrum is cleared for their use. These new services will combine data and voice, treating transmission in a different way. Packet switching is a fundamental, elemental change between how wireless was delivered in the past and how it will be presented in the future.

14. Regulatory Trends over time
Reallocation of spectrum from government to nongovernmental uses
Allocation of more spectrum for mobile rather than fixed applications
Use of auctions to assign spectrum
Increased licensee flexibility in use of spectrum
Increased competition
Radio frequency spectrum – used to be a commons, established property rights in other to manage it. Pay the FCC for the right to appropriate part of the spectrum.
Now FCC tries to auction spectrum – use frequency for more than one use, dissociate property right from use. Point is that there is nothing inherent to the good itself that requires property right allocation.
People with ideas of wireless networking have no place to play on the spectrum.
FCC current spread spectrum and wideband licensing – look at wireless tech that use more of the radio spectrum.
Handout about the radio spectrum – the way in which it has been sliced over time, historically derived way to think about the spectrum.
No techno features that are relevant today, it is one decision was made to impose structure on spectrum, which is not a finite good. When Marconi did the first wireless transmission there was only one frequence, people thought you could not use many radios at the same time. Over time saw could transmit on different frequencies – became the rationale to split the spectrum. Wall-size chart of who owns the spectrum from the NTIA.
Handout on how it is distributed, parts of spectrum have been assigned to specific uses over time.
At each time could exploit only frequencies that they knew about.
Wasted spectrum because TV licensees do not want to let go—FCC wants it reused for digital TV.
Fallacy that the spectrum is so crowded –
Spectrum does not exist in itself – the spectrum gets created by the transmitter. We try to come up with ways to visualize it. But there are imposed conceptualization, in a sense it is infinite. You expand the spectrum by thinking of more ways to send it. Also newer technologies can be programmed to limit only to parts of the spectrum.
Spectrum is continuous. Some ranges we know how to use to send signals.
Third way is that within the frequencies we know how to use you can always add new kinds of modulations and reuse them.
Scientific American peace – AM sends frequency radio wave, very regular and from time to time vary the amplitude – way to send information. Can use disturbance to send analog or digital information.
You can change amplitude or frequency to encode the information (AM and FM)
CDMA – code multiplexing – using same band but separating the code – all the conversations are in difference code/language to be able to distinguish the right one easier – way to filter characteristic of the signal.
In these 3 ways the spectrum is infinite, the amount we currently know how to use is not infinite.
Idea of cells – reusing the spectrum by extending the frequency – so that the same power can be reused in another city – with cell phones an area gets divided into cells, and which people can use cells at the same time, the smaller the cells the more users, the more reuse.
US competing cell standards, do not have scale network. Europe had to cooperate.
Also, US is not very dense. Expensive to put up enough towers to cover everything.
Other things –
Sand Hills Road has lousy coverage. No good explanation technologically. Also has to do with centralized government system which makes putting one more antenna up more difficult.
Churches leasing their towers to put up antennas.

15. Why the US lag? Innovation subjected to ATT decisions Spectrum Policy
Competency Trap
Timing of breakup
Spectrum Policy
Standard Policy
US: laissez-faire
Europe: government mandate
The Ma Bell culture of universal service –
Being skilled at universal service with wireline
Ask class, what is a competency class?
- this is when good performance with a no longer superior strategy creates a vicious cycle of adherence to proven ways and inhibits innovation.
- this still plagues ATT today
March’s exploration versus exploitation also works well here.

16. 3G Standard Wars  whose interests are at stake?
What is the effect of licensing/auctioning versus using unlicensed spectrum?
3G world is divided into two camps, and the two countries are on opposite sides. The debate over whether South Korea or Japan is in the lead is the most visible manifestation of a deeper discussion about which of two rival 3G technologies, called CDMA2000 and W-CDMA, is superior (South Korea's phones rely on a kind of CDMA2000; Japanese ones use a type of W-CDMA). With mobile operators around the world expected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building 3G networks over the next few years, a lot is riding on the outcome.
Unlicensed Spectrum – Innovation driven by users.
Compare 3G approach with the unlicensed approach – incentives, benefit, etc.
Contrast the 2 approaches.
Add questions for class throughout.
Who has an interest in having a unified standard and who has an interest in having different standards?
Provider companies – ATT, Sprint…
Equipment makers – Motorola, Nokia, Equipment, Makers
Customers.
Have different interests. Users have interests in more standardization, phone manufacturers have different interest –
Qualcomm now one of biggest phone companies because use a different standard
CDMA other way of squeezing more information, made alliance with some carriers (Verizon would buy their equipment) – competition was based on the standards
Gvt likes competition, the best system will win the market.
Europe said we don’t want competition, we want European standards, different than US, agreed on GSM. Motorola patents – had to license for free to EU, involved European makers (Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel, Symons) – agreed on working together. Led to system which is more useful to the users.
US was market policy – we will have competition between systems and the best will win, so none won and coexistence of standards.
MPS, PCS, TDMA (variant of GSM), CDMA, some carriers offer dual standards.
Still limited competition at the national level in Europe.
Regulatory structure creates some constraints which do not have to do with technology itself.
3G Mobile third gen cells are supposed to carry high speed data, still some discussion of battle of auctioning – US is much later for 3G auctions (Europe was plagued by bankruptcies).
Low Earth Orbite Satellites (Iridium joint venture – you could bypass the terrestrial phone system and use satellites to cover the entire globe – but there is no market for that!). Didn’t work too well, phones were too big also, buildings were a problem.
Half dozen companies – GlobalStar (microcellular, 5 years ago this was the next big thing and crashed).
The satellites – Iridium made them come down on earth, then someone bought them back and reinstated the service – second best business strategy is to relaunch the service much cheaper once the initial builder has gone bankrupt.
Few satellites can provide seamless Internet service. Tachyon provides that – pre-fetching, guessing what your next moves will be so when you ask it’s already downloaded.
Unlicensed UHF band – has been used lately by Wi-Fi and by Wireless LANs.
Used in that band and in the 5ghz band.
Why emergence of papers about Wireless?
policy issues for a long time
what is the role of government?

17. Competing/complementary techs?
Bluetooth
WiFi (unlicensed UHF band)