real carrier independence requires software radios [LWN.net]

real carrier independence requires software radios

Posted Jun 28, 2007 19:15 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421)
In reply to: What do the carriers think? by ajross
Parent article: An update from OpenMoko

I guess the real problem is the proliferation of mobile phone standards; for example, a lot of US carriers don't use GSM. The ideal thing would be if it were possible to implement GSM, EVDO, etcetera in software. It's technically possible (e.g. Vanu Inc. apparently had a GSM receiver running on a 1GHz Pentium laptop 5 years ago); I wonder whether it's nearing possibility for the CPUs that run in a typical smartphone?

(The initial OpenMoko-based phone is using a standard hardware GPRS modem from TI with a proprietary binary driver. This is understandable, as their primary concern is not the software-radio problem.)

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real carrier independence requires software radios

Posted Jun 28, 2007 20:55 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

For software radio to be technically viable, it's not enough for the CPU to be fast enough to keep up with hardware radio alternatives -- it would have to keep up while drawing the same amount of power. Not my area of expertise, but this seems like a pretty significant barrier.

(Then there are the idiotic FCC rules.)

real carrier independence requires software radios

Posted Jul 3, 2007 23:55 UTC (Tue) by rise (guest, #5045) [Link]

According to my sources inside Qualcomm a decent number of chipsets are available that do CDMA as well as GSM, but for various & sundry (as well as stupid) reasons they're almost never used to do both.