advantages and disadvantages of GSM

GSM is still dominant in the mobile market, shares 80% worldwide market, in spite of fast development of CDMA. There is a comparison that gives me vivid impression. Imagine a cocktail party, where couples are talking to each other in a single room. The room represents the available bandwidth. In GSM, a speaker takes turns talking to a listener. The speaker talks for a short time and then stops to let another pair talk. There is never more than one speaker talking in the room, no one has to worry about two conversations mixing. In CDMA, any speaker can talk at any time; however each uses a different language. Each listener can only understand the language of their partner. As more and more couples talk, the background noise (representing the noise floor) gets louder, but because of the difference in languages, conversations do not mix.

There are a lot of advantages of GSM:
GSM is mature; this maturity means a more stable network with robust features;
Less signal deterioration inside buildings;
Ability to use repeaters;
Talktime is generally higher in GSM phones due to the pulse nature of transmission.;
GSM covers virtually all parts of the world so international roaming is not a problem;
The much bigger number of subscribers globally creates a better network effect for GSM handset makers, carriers and end users.

On the other hand, the disadvantages of GSM have been noticed:
Pulse nature of TDMA transmission used in 2G interferes with some electronics, especially certain audio amplifiers. 3G uses W-CDMA now.
Intellectual property is concentrated among a few industry participants, creating barriers to entry for new entrants and limiting competition among phone manufacturers.
GSM has a fixed maximum cell site range of 35 km, which is imposed by technical limitations.

When I look at 3G, I still can’t fully understand the advantages of 3G. However, some issues debated by 3G providers and users attract me, such as Expensive input fees for the 3G service licenses, Numerous differences in the licensing terms, Large amount of debt currently sustained by many telecommunication companies, Lack of member state support for financially troubled operators, Expense of 3G phones and so on.

Something I can do next....

Sorry for being so late to start writing my blog, because I have to prepare RF Transceiver Electronics course’s final presentation at NXP company in Nijmegen as well as my traineeship. However, a good thing to me is that I suddenly have a lot of interesting in GSM after the presentation at NXP Company. Hence I decided to choose this as my main topic. Since I know nothing about GSM, I have to learn this from very beginning. I checked from website and found some descriptions as shown below:


Global System for Mobile communications (GSM: originally from Groupe Spécial Mobile) is the most popular standard for mobile phones in the world. Its promoter, the GSM Association, estimates that 82% of the global mobile market uses the standard. GSM is used by over 3 billion people across more than 212 countries and territories. Its ubiquity makes international roaming very common between mobile phone operators, enabling subscribers to use their phones in many parts of the world. GSM differs from its predecessors in that both signal and speech channels are digital, and thus is considered a second generation (2G) mobile phone system. This has also meant that data communication was easy to build into the system.

I notice that GSM is considered as second generation (2G) mobile phone system. However, “3G” is a more popular word in the world of Mobile communications nowadays. It seems that I have a lot of work to do :
(1) Learn the technical details about 2G and 3G;
(2) compare the advantageous and disadvantageous of them;
(3) get new ideas from the development and performance of 2G and 3G.

Start to write a new blog

This is a new personal blog for course Regulations and Standards for Wireless Communication. I hope to learn something new and useful in this course. To assess how much and how good I have learned by writing a blog is a totally new form to me. However, I will try to do my best to explore something new in the area that interests me. Anyway, this is a new start, I am excited about this.