Worst of the Week: Metric System: Part Deux

Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
I know there are some of you out there who think all of this talk about network operators migrating en masse to the LTE standard for 4G services will be the bee’s knees and finally put a halt to these silly technology wars that have been raging in the wireless space since before Han took that fateful shot at Greedo.
And you may just be right.
I mean, just imagine a world where any phone would work on any network no matter where in the world you go. But, I would also propose that such a world might not be a world we would want to live in and in fact such a move could bring about the (cue the dramatic music) END OF THE WORLD!!!!!
Let me explain.
If a single phone worked everywhere, think of all the time not spent scouring the Internet for unlocked cellphones or crazy Japanese-only devices that have their send and receive signals all backwards and upside down. What will we do with all of that spare time? Spend it with family? Do something good for humanity? Rescue kittens from trees? Do you see what I am saying? Madness.
And just think of all the fun things we will be missing if every carrier has the same network technology. Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility would have no reason to file ridiculous lawsuits against each other claiming one’s network is somehow insignificantly superior to the others, or that the words one carrier uses in its advertisements hurts the feelings of the other carrier. Madness.
Also, am I the only one with a suspicious eye toward this European-developed LTE standard? Can we really trust these Europeans? Don’t they all drive mopeds and wear strange-looking shoes? Didn’t they just elect some guy from Belgium as president of their continent? Belgium?
And ever since their failed attempt at getting us to adopt the metric system, I suspect those sneaky Europeans have been plotting and scheming to find another way to infiltrate and eventually exert control over the U.S. Sure, we might have fallen for the Spice Girls with their hypnotic lyrics and dance moves tied to easy-to-remember names, but luckily they imploded due to the Europeans forgetting to realize that so much talent could never share a stage together.
How do we stop this wireless unification and thus the (cue dramatic music) END OF THE WORLD!?!?!?
Easy. We must get all the smart people in the wireless industry together to develop as many wireless technology standards as possible. I am not just talking about throwing more money at CDMA or WiMAX. I am talking about developing dozens of new technologies that will promise everything consumers could ever dream of.
Do you want 1 gazillion bit per second uplink speeds while moving at 200 miles per hour in your Suburban? Let me introduce you to Ultra-Fast-Mega-Awesome Mobile Technology. Want something that will allow you to watch every television channel around the world while encased in your Fortress of Solitude? Here is Totally-Bitchin’-Super-Fly Mobile Television Standard 3.2? (This is way better than the 3.1 standard, which only provided access to C-Span and The Disney Channel.) Want to send text messages to everyone in your contact list at once while driving through a school zone blindfolded? Well, that is something you can actually do now, so I guess we don’t need a new technology for that.
But, you get my drift. We need to develop a new technology for every possible mobile niche imaginable. This may seem like an idea that goes against some of my recent rants of simplicity, but I say ignore that. I was obviously under some strange trance or listening to some of my pirated Spice Girl tracks when I thought those up.
This is the real deal people and the only true way to save not just the wireless industry, but to save America. Now let’s get those yard sticks out and beat back this LTE threat to individuality!
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–Seriously?!? You people want extras?!? Did you not just read what I posted above?!? We don’t have time for extras!!! We need to get on this anti-LTE bandwagon ASAP!!! No more watching cute kittens falling asleep. We have some bandwagoning to do.
–O.K. For those who are really in need of something more here is an awesome paragraph taken straight from a new white paper by 3G America’s on LTE TDD and lending further proof that we must stop this LTE proliferation before it’s too late. You may want to be sitting down when reading this, or at least wear a motorcycle helmet so your exploding brain does not make a mess:
“The bundling mechanism combines the acknowledgements from multiple hybrid-ARQ processes such that a positive acknowledgement will be sent only in case all downlink transmissions were correctly received. The benefit of this approach is that the number of acknowledgement messages to be sent from a terminal in single subframe is minimized, which is important especially for coverage-limited terminals. To handle situations where the terminal misses one or several downlink assignments, and therefore may erroneously report a positive acknowledgement if data in the detected subframes is correctly decoded, there is an index in the downlink assignment from which the terminal can learn how many subframes have been assigned and hence detect whether assignments have been missed.”
If that somehow made sense to you than you probably should not be reading this column.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at [email protected].