Cell phones

[phloyd]

Originally Posted by dialog_gvf

Can you give a relevant example?

North America certainly can warrant unique VARIANTS of products. But, are there examples where an entire product concept is unique to North America but serviced by Asian CEs?

Cell phones are one example. NA had their own version of TDMA digital - it was a fairly recent thing for AT&T to adopt GSM (the one the whole rest of the world uses) and merge with Cingular.

Note also that Japan has unique cellular phone systems.

These markets are large enough to support these specialised products. The point is that the NA market could easily sustain an HD DVD hardware business, with two caveats:

1) Toshiba has already killed all profits for HD DVD hardware.

2) Content is key (see the sig! ) - I agree with aristotles that without the content, there is no hope for HD DVD. That said, they would have to lose Warner or Universal (or both) to have enough impact to actually kill the format - otherwise it could easily be on life support for years.

[MrBogey]

Originally Posted by phloyd

Cell phones are one example. NA had their own version of TDMA digital - it was a fairly recent thing for AT&T to adopt GSM (the one the whole rest of the world uses) and merge with Cingular.

Minor quibble irrelevant to the point. AT&T had spun off their wireless division years ago and was bought out completely by Cingular. SBC(owning 60% of Cingular) then bought AT&T completely and renamed it's entire company to AT&T. The New AT&T then merged with BellSouth(owner of 40% of Cingular) to bring the entire operation under one umbrella and renamed Cingular to AT&T. Specifically they refer to it as "wireless from AT&T" or AT&T Mobility because AT&T Wireless (the old pre-Cingular buyout division) was known as the worst cell carrier in the US.

[Anthony P]

Cell phones are one example. NA had their own version of TDMA digital - it was a fairly recent thing for AT&T to adopt GSM (the one the whole rest of the world uses) and merge with Cingular.

GSM is a form of "Time division multiple access".

there are two types of "Radio" division standards
"Time division multiple access" and "Code division multiple access"
when first used on cell phones they used the same term to name the two cell networks (TDMA and CDMA). GSM came out later and even though it is a TDMA it is not "compatible" with the TDMA cell standard.

Think of it like DVD, DVD is the name of the disk and the movie standard. a DVD can have stuff on it, like a BD-9, that makes it incompatible on a DVD player.

I will use TDMA-C if I mean the cell phone standard and TDMA-R if I mean the radio transmission schema

TDMA-C was not only in NA, it existed in Asia as well (I think Europe skiped 1G). What happened is that since Europe and Asia had moved to 2G much faster there was a time when TDM-C was only available in NA (I think), Europe decided to go GSM only (a evolutionary form of TDMA-R) and Asia is a bit like NA where there are both forms (TDMA-R and CDMA-R)

So it is not a good example, because manufacturers will still supporting TDMA which had existed in other regions and it was just a matter of time before it got replaced.

[dialog_gvf]

Originally Posted by phloyd

Cell phones are one example. NA had their own version of TDMA digital - it was a fairly recent thing for AT&T to adopt GSM (the one the whole rest of the world uses) and merge with Cingular.

That's a difference in the outside interface. The base technologies (display, battery, media, camera, bluetooth, keypad, software, ...) are all the same.

With HD DVD a company would be dealing with drives, a great deal of software, and maybe decoder chips that they don't use elsewhere. That's an entire amount of engineering that can't borrow a great deal from the Blu-ray engineering being done for the rest of the world.

Gary

[phloyd]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

GSM is a form of "Time division multiple access".

Indeed it is. It is not compatible with NA TDMA as you noted. Europe and Australasia never used NA TDMA, they went with GSM.

The companies that eventually became T-Mobile and the companies that eventually became Cingular also went with GSM, and Sprint went CDMA. So there were effectively three standards in NA.

I think there are a number of similarities to the BD/ HD DVD case. Especially since GSM was:

1) The preference outside of the USA
2) The more advanced technology with the adaptive channel filtering and trellis coded modulation
3) ... it eventually won out even in the USA???

[Anthony P]

Indeed it is. It is not compatible with NA TDMA as you noted. Europe and Australasia never used NA TDMA, they went with GSM.

I don't feal like going on on this (I am sure most others don't care and extremely off topic) but http://www.3g.co.uk/PR/March2004/6843.htm as an exaqmple that TDMA did exist elsewhere (and not GSM TDMA which is usualy referenced as GSM and not TDMA)

So there were effectively three standards in NA.

even though that is true (actually 4 if you add iDen used by Nextel and Telus' Mike service which is yet an other different incompatible form of TDMA ) your info was limited to the US, those companies don't operate up here in Canada (but here Telus/Bell CDMA (upgraded to 1XRTT), Rogers TDMA (upgraded to GSM), Fido GSM (now owned by Rogers but the name still exists) and Clearnet iDen (bought by Telus and branded as Telus Mike)

PS also for GSM you have
GSM-1900: Urban NA +
GSM-850: Rural NA +
GSM-1800: Urban Europe/most of Asia
GSM-900 :Rural Europe /most of Asia
So the NA standard is in effect different from the rest of the world.