Telecom Informer

    

by The Prophet

Hello, and greetings from the Central Office!

Or, in this case, the Central Fancy Lounge.  I am writing to you from Vancouver, where I'm en route to Hong Kong and then onward to Myanmar.  I managed to social engineer my way into the first class lounge and, soon, I'll be winging my away across the Pacific in - somehow - a first class seat.  Given that I spend most of my time on the road in Seat 31B, it's a nice change.  They literally serve champagne and caviar and it's not even in a heavily ironic sense.  Naturally, I dressed up for the occasion, picking my least battered cargo pants and tennis shoes for this one.  The staff are visibly appalled and are doing their best to ignore me.

I love to visit Vancouver.  It has always been a wonderful, cosmopolitan city (apart from the disgusting Automatic Electric EAX switches still in use by TELUS).  In fact, it's so civilized that mobile phones even work underground on public transportation!  Every time I come to Canada, though, I grit my teeth.  Why?  I have a long-term telephony problem that hangs like an albatross around my neck.

Ten years ago, I took a vacation to Newfoundland.  Back then, my mobile phone provider was Sprint, and they had no reasonably priced way to roam in Canada.  I forget exactly what they charged, but it was something ridiculous like $1 per minute plus long distance.  And there was no data service available at all; only voice and text were offered.  So naturally, I picked up a Virgin Mobile Canada Nokia 6015i and promptly set about hacking the WAP stack.  All I had to do was change the DNS server to an outside one (I used Sprint's) while in debugging mode and I was able to browse the mobile web for free for my entire trip, making the $50 I spent on the phone and $20 for the recharge a good investment.  Better yet, using a data cable, I was able to tether!  14.4 kbps mobile Internet in my tent while camping near Gros Morne National Park, and I was in seventh heaven.  I must have used at least 50 MB of data on my trip, which back then was a lot.  Not surprisingly, Virgin Mobile noticed my shenanigans and fixed the problem not long after that.

Well, you know what happens next.  What started as a $20 prepaid balance has grown over the years to being a balance of over $1,000.  Why?  There is no monthly fee at all if you have a British Columbia phone number, so the only thing that drains the balance is voice minutes and SMS.  All that I have to pay is $100 per year to keep the service active (which applies as a credit to my account).  Naturally, I didn't want to lose the $20 balance I had after I returned from Newfoundland, so a year later I paid $100 to keep it, and have just been putting another $100 per year on my account ever since.

Virgin Mobile Canada is a Canadian MVNO, but an unusual one in that it is owned by Bell Canada.  Over the years, Bell has acquired most of the Canadian mobile phone networks on which it operates, so I'm not sure whether it can properly be called "virtual" anymore.  Originally sold as a "pay-as-you-go" service (and this is the grandfathered plan I still have), it's like a mobile phone plan out of the 1990s except that it's still available today.  Minutes cost 30 cents each, long distance calling (remember long distance?) is charged at 30 cents per minute on top of that, and if you receive a call in a different region than that where your phone number is based, you pay for forwarding the call from your home region.  Despite the high charges, I bring my trusty and increasingly dated Nokia 6015i on every visit to Canada and valiantly attempt to use a few voice minutes or send a couple of texts.  The phone has long ago ceased to be useful for anything on the Internet whatsoever, with WAP being a long-forgotten standard and 14.4 kbps unable to keep up with essentially anything online.  My T9 skills are no longer relevant in a world of touch-screen smartphones.

Still, the Nokia was like a comfortable pair of old shoes.  I say "was" because today I had to give it up.  A couple of months ago, I received notice from Virgin Mobile Canada that I needed to switch to an LTE phone or risk my service being suspended.  When I called, nobody was really sure what would happen if I didn't switch, but nobody was willing to guarantee that I wouldn't lose the balance either.  With over $1,000 (CAD) at stake, that was too big a risk, so I decided not to experiment with telephony disobedience.

Canadian mobile phone carriers have taken a dramatically different approach than U.S. carriers to the retirement of CDMA2000, a standard that increasingly lacks relevance in the world of LTE.  Developed by Qualcomm, CDMA IS-95 2G networks (and later CDMA2000 3G networks) were designed as a smooth network migration path to digital from analog.  These supported the use of an ESN/MIN pair, meaning that billing systems didn't have to be upgraded.  In fact, phones could support both networks with the same ESN/MIN pair and be billed identically regardless of the technology used.  This allowed carriers to roll out digital networks slowly while still maintaining good coverage with their existing analog networks.

Of course, the tradeoff was that this standard was incompatible with the GSM digital standard used in the rest of the world.  That tradeoff was unacceptable to some carriers, particularly cost-conscious ones (GSM network equipment was less expensive).  In Canada, Rogers Wireless opted to switch its customers to GSM, eventually retiring its AMPS analog network entirely.  AT&T took the same approach in the United States.  However, almost every other carrier opted to go with CDMA.  In the U.S., the companies that eventually became Verizon did the same, along with U.S. Cellular.

"PCS" carriers, with no legacy networks to support, were about evenly split in the technology chosen.  At the time that these networks were built, CDMA offered faster data speeds and "soft handoffs," which offered a better customer experience than GSM.  Call quality was better, and network operators could also offer roaming on legacy analog networks.  This attractive combination spurred Sprint, Cricket, MetroPCS, and many other PCS carriers in the U.S. (along with Bell in Canada for the PCS coverage it built) to choose CDMA.  In the U.S., VoiceStream (which later became T-Mobile) chose GSM, and Fido did the same in Canada.

The direct upgrade path to IS-95 CDMA was CDMA2000.  However, this was immediately challenged by UMTS, the successor to GSM.  UMTS (later followed by HSDPA) was a CDMA technology offering all of the advantages of CDMA2000 along with faster speeds and better features.  Although CDMA2000 doesn't support phone calls and data usage at the same time, UMTS and HSDPA did.  Along with this, they had backwards compatibility with GSM and its massive globally deployed userbase.

This started to create a problem for carriers that had adopted CDMA2000, because they couldn't get the best handsets.  It all came to a head with the launch of the iPhone.  Apple decided to launch with AT&T, and they bet big on GSM and its successor technologies.  This wasn't done in a vacuum.  Outside of North America, CDMA never really caught on, while GSM adoption exploded.  A handful of carriers used CDMA (Telecom New Zealand, China Telecom, and Iusacell in Mexico), but almost none of them were the dominant providers in their respective markets.  GSM marched across Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.  Europe even mandated GSM compatibility by law.

The writing was on the wall, so Canadian CDMA carriers - unlike their U.S. counterparts - began deploying HSDPA and UMTS on their towers alongside CDMA2000.  In 2009, TELUS soft launched HSDPA in Canada, giving its customers access to the latest handsets.  In 2012, TELUS stopped selling any handsets with CDMA support, so any customer forced to upgrade has a handset at least five years old.  Meanwhile in the U.S., CDMA carriers stuck with CDMA2000 and waited for 4G W-CDMA technologies to emerge before making major network upgrades.  In fact, Verizon and Sprint still sell handsets with CDMA2000 support.  While CDMA will eventually be retired in the U.S., Verizon has committed to supporting the technology through at least 2021.

So, that's why I just paid $5 for a new Virgin Mobile SIM card.  And with that, it's time for me to "enjoy" it and call some Canadian friends.  I have a modern phone supporting nearly all of the latest technologies, a 4G LTE SIM card, and a mobile phone plan that is a relic of the 1990s.  However, it's one that I'll hang onto with a death grip as long as there is no monthly fee!

Enjoy your winter, and try to use a CDMA network while you still can.  As of January 31, 2017, you won't be able to do so in Canada.  Try to be the last call.