Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: John Gilmore Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: BAD Digital Cellular Standard Under Development Message-ID: <8244@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 25 May 90 02:15:20 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 68 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 384, Message 1 of 11 I heard rumors of a digital cellular telephone standard among DSP folks, and tracked them down. The draft standard is called "IS 54" and its project number is 2215. It is currently not available anywhere; they ran out of the drafts, and it won't be published for about a month. This is your standards bureacracy serving *you*! The draft will eventually be published for public comment by EIA in DC (202 457 4900). The contact person there is Eric Schiml in the Telecommunications Industry Association upstairs, at +1 202 457 4990. The chairman of the committee is Peter Nurse of Novatel, at +1 403 295 4673. The description I have heard of the standard is that it is being rushed through in order to make more capacity in the cellular systems in major metro areas. By DSPing voice down to 8Kbits/sec, they can put three separate conversations on each existing cellular channel. Of course, the resulting voices are not nearly as intelligible, and it's probably all but useless for modem traffic. The three conversations are time-multiplexed onto the channel by synchronizing the three cellular phones to alternately transmit 5ms frames such that, when received at the cell after the speed-of-light transmission delay, they occur at different times and thus don't interfere. The standard makes no provision for data traffic and no provision for encryption, even though it is digital end-to-end. The engineers I've spoken with seem to think that its "privacy" will be improved because it's digital, i.e. a scanner won't be able to decode the interleaved binary signal. Of course, each phone built to this standard will have the circuitry to do that, and nobody will modify the ROMs or improve the scanners. More security-by-obscurity. I originally wanted to track down the committee to discuss the requirements of Dynabooks for reliable, nationwide, mobile digital data service. But these folks aren't doing anything like that. In fact, one engineer told me he thought Dynabooks were a bad idea because "people shouldn't be reading while they are driving"!!! The whole idea is to sell more yak-wuile-you-drive to yups, they don't have any idea where the real portable digital markets are at. Real workstations will be palm-sized and portable in 1993 or so, long before the telcos are ready to network them *cheaply* in an office or neighborhood while having them able to remain online on the net (at a price) while traveling all over the country. What hacker, stockbroker, student, reporter, ... would be without one? Anybody got an angle by which we can bypass the telcos and do it right while they blunder? The plan is to reallocate some of the current analog cellular frequencies for this IS 54 bastard digital cellular service, in crowded metro areas. Probably the small towns would never get this equipment. But what is worse is that the act of deploying it in a metro area will REDUCE the number of analog frequencies available. The people who already have cellular phones will get WORSE congestion and fewer frequencies. The people who buy new digital cellular phones will get shitty voice quality and phones that won't work at all in minor markets, or for modems or fax machines. The folks who want real mobile digital telecommunications, even at phone company prices, won't get anything. Ditto the folks who want real privacy on mobile phones. (Remember Heinlein's "hush and scramble" features in every phone? "We have the technology" -- we just aren't deploying it.) The only ones who win from IS 54 are the cellular carriers (who expand their customer base without deploying more cells) and the phone makers (who make people buy another phone as they crowd more early adopters into fewer analog channels). And guess who's writing this standard?