GSM vs CDMA

GSM vs CDMA

Posted Mar 22, 2007 16:44 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: competition is good? by JamesErik
Parent article: Linux and flash

I've worked in the telecom industry and the really big difference between GSM and CDMA is the signal encoding. CDMA has a significantly more advanced signal encoding that allows the tower to transmit many signals to many phones without anything getting confused. It removed many of the frequency and distance limitations of GSM.

On the other hand, the protocol stack for GSM is significantly better than CDMA. The way I heard it they took the protocol stack from GSM and the signal encoding from CDMA and created 3G.

However, that wasn't what made GSM great. What made GSM great is that the handsets are not tied to a provider, just the SIM cards are. So you could buy a phone and it would work on any provider, no worries. A GSM phone in Australia would work in Europe without any hassles whatsoever. Even now, you can buy a CDMA phone is Australia and guess what, you can never switch provider. Which is why people don't do it...

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