 |
|
|
What is happening with cellular in India? I thought it was all GSM, and now I’ve been told that it is going CDMA. What impact is this going to have on wireless data roaming?
- Many countries are going through turmoil as 2G systems give way to 3G. GSM is still the dominant cellular technology in India. Some carriers have augmented their voice systems with GPRS packet data. It steals 1 or more (usually 2 or 3) of the 8 GSM timeslots for packet data. Because voice coders are about 13 kbps, this provides aggregate data rates that are multiples of this basic data rate. The major limiting factors are the ability of phones to handle multiple timeslots without overheating along with the need to divide the available bandwidth among multiple mobiles.
- CDMA recently slid into India under the guise of ‘Wireless Local Loop’. These systems were supposed to provide ‘fixed wireless’ service from a central office. Roaming was out of the question, but CDMA carriers eventually persuaded the Indian telecom regulator that as long as they paid equivalent license fees to the GSM carriers, they would be allowed to provide national and even international roaming to their customers.
- This new competitive environment should be good for wireless data users in India, and Canadians who travel to India on business. CDMA carriers will likely install 1X data services to out-compete GPRS, followed sharply by EDGE from the GSM carriers, a response of megabit speeds using CDMA DV or DO and eventually Wideband CDMA from the GSM carriers.
- Once roaming issues are worked out, Canadians should be able to travel to India, and to other countries undergoing a similar evolution, and seamlessly access their wireless data services.
David Crowe is a wireless standards and technology consultant based in Calgary. He published the newsletters Cellular Networking Perspectives and Wireless Security Perspectives. He can be reached at David.Crowe@cnp-wireless.com.
© – Copyright