Time to give everyone another wrinkle in the brain. Today’s mission is to take little time out of your day to break down GSM & CDMA. GSM is Global System for Mobile Communication and CDMA is Code Division Multiple Access.
GSM is the dominant mobile phone standard for most of the world. GSM uses SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards, which are removable, thumb-sized smart cards that can store info like phone book entries. SIM cards allows users to switch phones by swapping SIM cards from one phone to another.
CDMA doesn’t use SIM cards, instead all of the phone’s info is backed up via carrier. In some areas overseas, they do have an equivalent to SIM card called a R-UIM (Removable User Identity Module) card not yet available in the states. CDMA is a form of spread-spectrum, a family of digital communication that have been used in military applications as well as federal agencies for many years. CDMA has no hard limit for the number of users who share one cell tower, unlike GSM which the call quality would suffer beyond a set limit.
GSM & CDMA provide similar features (like voice, messaging, & data services) but operate differently. GSM phones are incompatible with CDMA networks & vice-versa. AT&T & T-Mobile are GSM carriers and Sprint/Nextel & Verizon are CDMA carriers.
We shall keep informing you good people but if there’s a topic we haven’t touched yet, let us know in the comments.
