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Communications Government Patents The Almighty Buck Politics

The Battle for Iraq's Cell Phones 61

Posted by jamie from the best-deals dept.
Mother Jones has a new report, Crossing the Lines, on the backroom wheeling and dealing over "one natural resource Saddam Hussein never managed to exploit -- the nation's cellular phone frequencies... Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose district includes many Qualcomm employees, had tried to wrap his favored company in the flag. He denounced the cellular system used by Iraq's neighbors as 'an outdated French standard,' and proposed a law that would effectively mandate Qualcomm on Iraq." Qualcomm's patented standard was turned down, but according to the documents and emails Mother Jones says it has obtained, the battle didn't end there.
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The Battle for Iraq's Cell Phones More

The Battle for Iraq's Cell Phones

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  • So here's another company exploiting the deaths of innocents to make more money.

    When is stuff like this going to make it into the mainstream news?
    • Crap. Now I have to find a new email client. I really liked Eudora too.
      • Then stop supporting /. whos parent company supports outsourcing to China with no regard to the labor status of those working in the oursourced factories. If you support /. you are indirectly supporting slave labor.

        • Then stop supporting /. whos parent company supports outsourcing to China with no regard to the labor status of those working in the oursourced factories. If you support /. you are indirectly supporting slave labor.
          Really?
          • Where do you think that most of the product that think geek sales are made?

            They also are big supporters of offshoring to India.

            I used to have the PDF's they sent me, if I find them I will let you know.
            • Do Think Geek actually have the products made, or do they just sell other people's products? It's the difference between Nike and a supermarket.
    • Would it make you happier if the innocents died and their survivors didn't have cell phone service ?


    • > So here's another company exploiting the deaths of innocents to make more money. When is stuff like this going to make it into the mainstream news?

      Here [informatio...house.info] is Harper's Magazine's take on the whole thing.

  • lol, talk about flamebait. what if it was a spanish, or english design, would that be alright? outrageous. somehow i think this was taken out of context (by a left-leaing paper). he can't be that much of a f**$%^* idiot can he? or can he? excuse me for not reading the loong article.

    • Re:'an outdated French standard,' (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RzUpAnmsCwrds ( 262647 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @07:21PM (#10368184)
      GSM is a predominantly French-designed standard (GSM originally stood for ), and compared to CDMA2000 it is quite outdated (UMTS, the "new" GSM, is based on CDMA technology).

      CDMA2000 has faster data than GSM (1xEV-DO is faster than GPRS/EDGE, and 1x-RTT is faster than GPRS), and it supports more users in the same bandwidth. It also excells in rural areas where the slot delay prevents a GSM cell from contacting hansets, even if the signal is strong enough.

      That said, GSM is the right standard for Iraq. Every other country in the region uses GSM. It's also less encumbered by patents, unlike the relatively proprietary CDMA2000.

      Frankly, I think that Iraq should be deciding for itself what phone system to implement. Here in the US, the government didn't mandate any particular system, and as a result Qualcomm was allowed to develop a whole new system for cellular communication.
      • "(GSM originally stood for ),"

        Whoops. GSM originally stood for "Groupe Systeme Mobile", French for "Mobile System Group". It was later rebranded "Global System for Mobile communication".

      • Re:'an outdated French standard,' (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        A friend of mine is cellphone tech, and tells me that CDMA sounds great in theory, but sucks in practice. He says the spread spectrum system can't handle many users without severely degrading, according to the tests he's read.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • What you've experienced may be due to the coverage levels of GSM and CDMA networks in the US. As I understand it, CDMA is far more extensive. If all the CDMA towers were replaced with GSM, I imagine you'd get a much better signal on your GSM phones.

            I don't have any stats on which works better in a controlled experiment.
      • I'm passing up moderating to reply, but you need to be corrected. GSM was originally an abreviation of french words, that is true, but it is not a french design. GSM was a European standard, and french happens to be one of the major languages of the European Union, along with english and german. GSM equipment is now designed and built throughout the world, including in the USA.

        So, just in case anyone didn't get that, GSM was designed as a EUROPEAN STANDARD and is now used worldwide.
    • That's obviously not how he meant it, troll.
      • oh yeah? you think i'm the troll. you don't think that was implied? i'm asking who's the troll, the republican, the newspaper, or slashdot. why didn't they just say "an outdated standard"? although this could just be a misunderstanding from text-based communication, that's why i was asking for context.


    • excuse me for not reading the loong article.

      I really wish slashdot had a mod option of "fucking idiot". I once suggested "clueless" as a substitute for either "flamebait" or "troll" (which overlap, IMHO) but that was rejected.

    • Re:'an outdated French standard,' (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @08:21PM (#10368673) Homepage Journal
      well.. you see, instead of being able to drive to the neighboring countries and use the same phone there he wants an assload of money, for himself.

      that being said, you could say gsm being 'outdated', because it isn't exactly 'new'. however, you could at the same time say that it's a proven and affordable system... besides, lets face it, it's a bit stupid to ponder what network to build if you wouldn't even have safe access to all regions to build it and it's going to tough to get the investment back(or hell, to get anyone out there to build it).

      and he probably used the term "outdated french system" because otherwise he would have been laughed at so hard...

  • Politics For Nerds?? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I thought politics.slashdot.org was mostly supposed to be about the upcoming US Presidential Election?

    How exactly does this story fit in here? Not to troll, but this hardly seems like it matters to anybody other than Jamie.

    And BTW, it's funny to yet another Mother Jones story on slashdot, a magazine that's "flamebait" like a mofo.

    • It's also a general election. Stories like this help to underscore the disgusting fact that the currently Republican controlled Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches of our government are essentially circumventing the three branch checks and balances system that the founding fathers created. It's crony capitalism and it wouldn't happen if we had a government that was capable of having a valid debate about these issues. A valid debate can't happen with a corrupt majority, though.

      People need to see

      • It's crony capitalism and it wouldn't happen if we had a government that was capable of having a valid debate about these issues.

        True, true. However...

        People need to go into their local voting boths ... so that they can vote for the people with the (D)s after their names

        How the hell is more of the same going to solve the problem? If you're worried about crony capitalism and corruption and the like, the (D)'s aren't going to be any better than the (R)'s. What's truly disgusting is your us-versus-them m
        • Please note that I didn't say we need to vote a strictly D majority in. I'm not for that at all I probably should've stated that more clearly.

          We do need to get more of a 1:1 ratio of R:D asap, though. Then, when we have a government that can actually debate issues we can see where people stand on issues based on their actions, not their promises and tune things up in 2 & 4 years.

          • We do need to get more of a 1:1 ratio of R:D asap, though

            No, that would be scary. Very scary. Sit back and think about it for a bit. I can easily imagine the a 50/50 split in public opinion over a particular issue. But not for all issues. That would be unnatural. That's why we don't have a 50/50 split, why we have a Green and Libertarian party, and why we see people jump party lines each and every election.

            For an electorate to divide itself that evenly tells me that one of three things is happening: 1) t
    • Politics is also what happens after the election, which largely consists of lying through one's teeth to support one's sponsors. And in the case of party politics, lying through one's teeth to rationalize support of party-sponsored policy.

  • This was first suggested by Senator Orrin Hatch - R [senate.gov] who has Qualcomm as a major financier.
  • Darrell Issa engineered the California governor recall that gave us Governor Schwarzenegger. Of course he's working on bringing Skynet to Baghdad.
    • What a great movie concept! I'm going to start working on the treatment right this minute!

      al'Turmenadrar:

      Dirty infidel western computers have perverted the will of Allah, and used black magic to send an assassin back in time to kill Osama before he's even born. But the true believers manage to crash a jetliner into the temporal displacement facility, and send back a soldier to protect his burqua-covered mother and him. Watch as stupid western liberal laws throw obstacles in the path of the killer at ever
      • Nah, too implausible. You'd need Allah to bless his otherwise deprived people with a monopoly on an essential modern resource, so when it runs out the keepers of the faith would have the money to bribe a fundamentalist simpleton who'd accidentally let the assasins succeed. No one will believe it. You might as well throw some Enron conspiracy in there at that point.

  • Glad they went with GSM (Score:4, Insightful)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @10:06PM (#10369464)
    GSM is so wide spread throughout the world, that I'm glad the administration didn't let some greedy company muscle their own technology into Iraq, orphaning them from the rest of the networks in the region. To me the idea of having generic GSM phones connected to the network with a chip is brilliant. I can move networks and change phones with ease. I can take my trusty triband phone from here in the US and roam with ease. Better yet buy a local sim chip. GSM is open and implementable by anyone.

    I'm glad there were a few people making decisions who were smart enough and honest enough to recognize this companies attempt to bully its way into a lucrative contract.

    As for what takes over from GSM, we'll see. Just as in computers, patent-encumbered "standards" will do a world of harm. In this thing I think CDMA is very harmful.

  • GO QUALCOMM (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As a Qualcomm shareholder (500 shares) I strongly suggest going with Qualcomm rather than the inferior GSM standard.

    Also, GSM phones are the ones that cause cancer.

    Choose wisely..
    • Also, GSM phones are the ones that cause cancer.
      As far as I know, they don't. The only thing that has been measured is a slight temperature increase in brain surface tissue. If that's what you're afraid of, then don't go out in the sun either.
  • The best solution would be not to mandate any standard. Let's leave it to Adam Smith's invisible hand.
    • The best solution would be not to mandate any standard.

      As your standard issue free market liberal, my instincts lie that way too, however:

      This is what caused the take-off of mobile phones in the US to be so much slower than in Europe. Similarly why TV in the US was so much later than in Britain and Germany. There are times when having somoene just say `that one' really helps get things going, even if `that one' is not in fact the best available.

      Standards are really good for infrastructure, if those

    • >The best solution would be not to mandate any standard. Let's leave it to Adam Smith's invisible hand.

      Using Adam's idea of an invisible hand as an argument in any single case flawed. First of all, it is (just) a model ("All models are wrong. Some models are useful." - George Box), and he's observation was for the total effect of all individuals. He did not (as you make it seem) proclaim that it was the case for all individual cases. In fact, the benefit for a single individual is in many cases a d

  • It should be noted that Issa is the guy who spent $4 million (IIRC) of his own cash to recall Grey Davis and then cried when the Governator got everyone's support. The guy is just a little partisan, I'd say.

  • Pillaging Iraq (Score:5, Informative)

    by GOD_ALMIGHTY ( 17678 ) <(curt.johnson) (at) (gmail.com)> on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:45AM (#10370939) Homepage
    For those interested, Harper's has a really interesting article on the mechanics of the corruption in the reconstruction contracts. Baghdad Year Zero - Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia [harpers.org]

    This may be more palatable if you feel Mother Jones goes off the deep end sometimes.
    • This may be more palatable if you feel Mother Jones goes off the deep end sometimes.

      Pardon my offtopicness, but I'd like more info on Mother Jones. I'm considering subscribing -- I like the idea of supporting "Mother Jones' hellraising journalism." I'm a Green Party member and proud-to-say-it liberal, so it sounds like something I'd enjoy. On the other hand, I think anything can be taken too far, and I'd no sooner give money to tinfoil-hat folks on the left than I would those on the right. I want hard
      • Mother Jones is definately not the worst offender and they do have some really good articles. I just think the whole "hellraising journalism" thing is a little to exciting for my tastes. I'm sure a subscription would be very entertaining and they are a publication worth supporting. I just like having a more stoic source for my information. Just read the online version for a while and make up your own mind. I know I've wasted money on much worse things.

        As far as supporting stuff, go get a membership to Acor
  • I don't know guys is it off the topic or not but I felt I have to add something here. evey time i contact my family in iraq they tell me that the cell phones are the most effective weapon insurgents are using specially on high ways and the road from jordan to baghdad (spoting the westerners on the boarder) making a caal to other insurgents to wait (mostly between Falluja-Ramadi) to take action and also ignite the road side bombs. Sorry if this is off topic

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