Comment It's Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (Score 1) 149
This is nothing new! It sounds exactly like the technology that NASA used to send back live TV from the Moon. Only back then the name was DSSS. As a reader of NASA Tech Briefs, I know that NASA has made this technology freely available to whoever wants to develop it.
I don't see this upstart company having any advantage over other companies that are using DSSS in consumer applications. I've compared CDMA to TDMA phones in the same markets, and my conclusion is that Qualcomm's version of CDMA just isn't the best choice for voice telephony. It might not be the spread-spectrum technology that's the problem, probably the error corection routines and the codec. Still, there's a long distance (in any domain) between what's proving practical right now and the pie-in-the-sky predictions of this article. The engineering trades aren't nearly as awestruck as USAToday is!
I don't see this upstart company having any advantage over other companies that are using DSSS in consumer applications. I've compared CDMA to TDMA phones in the same markets, and my conclusion is that Qualcomm's version of CDMA just isn't the best choice for voice telephony. It might not be the spread-spectrum technology that's the problem, probably the error corection routines and the codec. Still, there's a long distance (in any domain) between what's proving practical right now and the pie-in-the-sky predictions of this article. The engineering trades aren't nearly as awestruck as USAToday is!
