Constant Touch by Jon Agar Page A
Authors: Jon Agar
Tags: science, Internet, Telecommunications, engineering and technology, electronics and communications, telephone and wireless technology, mobile telephones
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a smallpart of every phone call from the party is transmitted. A trick is played on each listener â they donât notice the gaps! This technique, easy by digital methods, is called Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), since you are dividing up the transmission into different time slots and letting lots of callers access it.
A third possibility is much harder to explain. It is best attacked from a different direction. Imagine someone at the party wanted to have a secret, illicit conversation. The caller could borrow a technique from the shadowy world of codebreaking. By mixing up the information that coded the secret conversation with a seemingly random signal, and transmitting the mixture together, then the caller could ensure that even when this was mixed in with other messages using the time division method, the receiver at the other end â if they knew what the random signal was â could unpick the original message. What this method â called Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) loses in simplicity, it gains in privacy. The invention of CDMA had its roots in San Diego County, where there existed a fruitful interplay between military contractors and top electronic research centres, such as the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Irwin Jacobs and Andrew J. Viterbi had met at UCSD in the 1960s and launched Linkabit, a military communications company, in 1968. In 1985 they sold out and started again with Qualcomm, through which Jacobs and Viterbi hoped tocommercialise another product of the Californian military-industrial complex: CDMA, a concept that had been developed when Linkabit had been asked to develop a satellite modem for the United States Air Force. Qualcomm had the skills to take CDMA from its military setting and to reap the considerable profits of entering the consumer communications market. (There was also a contract from the Hughes aerospace giant to help things along.) Nevertheless Qualcomm needed considerable powers of persuasion, since the decision was taken in 1992, on competition grounds, to allow both TDMA- and CDMA-based standards to proceed despite CDMA coming late to the party. The result was that the United States yet again resembled a patchwork, this time of a variety of incompatible digital standards.
This pattern of division and fracture lasted until 2005 and the launch of Appleâs iPhone. For deep reasons â rooted in Appleâs culture of end-to-end control of how users experience their electronic products, which will be discussed later â once the iPhone had achieved its remarkable success, American cellphone culture began to look and feel different. Nevertheless, there was still a divergence between the United States and the rest of the world, especially the developing world: while by 2009 over 85 per cent of Americans possessed one, they remain more reluctant to rely on their cellphone, or even to use it routinely, compared to manynon-Americans. Some, although very few, reject the compulsion for a life in constant touch. Nevertheless, it is the old, the poor and the less educated who are less likely to have a cellphone at all. The technology, too, best exemplified by the iPhone, reflects divergent values. Writing for the
New York Times
in 2010, Anand Giridharadas neatly summed it up when reflecting on American cellphone culture on his return from a visit to India:
Not for the first time, America and the rest of the world are moving in different ways. Americaâs innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are spiralling toward fancier, costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.
Chapter 9
Mob rule: competition and class in the UK
Inthe early 1990s, on trains across Britain, something exceedingly disturbing was happening. People were talking. Loudly. The anger, generated amongst unwilling
A third possibility is much harder to explain. It is best attacked from a different direction. Imagine someone at the party wanted to have a secret, illicit conversation. The caller could borrow a technique from the shadowy world of codebreaking. By mixing up the information that coded the secret conversation with a seemingly random signal, and transmitting the mixture together, then the caller could ensure that even when this was mixed in with other messages using the time division method, the receiver at the other end â if they knew what the random signal was â could unpick the original message. What this method â called Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) loses in simplicity, it gains in privacy. The invention of CDMA had its roots in San Diego County, where there existed a fruitful interplay between military contractors and top electronic research centres, such as the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Irwin Jacobs and Andrew J. Viterbi had met at UCSD in the 1960s and launched Linkabit, a military communications company, in 1968. In 1985 they sold out and started again with Qualcomm, through which Jacobs and Viterbi hoped tocommercialise another product of the Californian military-industrial complex: CDMA, a concept that had been developed when Linkabit had been asked to develop a satellite modem for the United States Air Force. Qualcomm had the skills to take CDMA from its military setting and to reap the considerable profits of entering the consumer communications market. (There was also a contract from the Hughes aerospace giant to help things along.) Nevertheless Qualcomm needed considerable powers of persuasion, since the decision was taken in 1992, on competition grounds, to allow both TDMA- and CDMA-based standards to proceed despite CDMA coming late to the party. The result was that the United States yet again resembled a patchwork, this time of a variety of incompatible digital standards.
This pattern of division and fracture lasted until 2005 and the launch of Appleâs iPhone. For deep reasons â rooted in Appleâs culture of end-to-end control of how users experience their electronic products, which will be discussed later â once the iPhone had achieved its remarkable success, American cellphone culture began to look and feel different. Nevertheless, there was still a divergence between the United States and the rest of the world, especially the developing world: while by 2009 over 85 per cent of Americans possessed one, they remain more reluctant to rely on their cellphone, or even to use it routinely, compared to manynon-Americans. Some, although very few, reject the compulsion for a life in constant touch. Nevertheless, it is the old, the poor and the less educated who are less likely to have a cellphone at all. The technology, too, best exemplified by the iPhone, reflects divergent values. Writing for the
New York Times
in 2010, Anand Giridharadas neatly summed it up when reflecting on American cellphone culture on his return from a visit to India:
Not for the first time, America and the rest of the world are moving in different ways. Americaâs innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are spiralling toward fancier, costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.
Chapter 9
Mob rule: competition and class in the UK
Inthe early 1990s, on trains across Britain, something exceedingly disturbing was happening. People were talking. Loudly. The anger, generated amongst unwilling
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