Congressman says Iraq should have American cell phones

WHAT A BEAUTY. An American congressman Darrell Issa of California wants to introduce a bill that will give preference to a cdmaOne based mobile network in Iraq, after the US has finished conquering that country.

The congressman argues that if the rival system, GSM, used in over 70 per cent of the world is allowed to take root it will harm the revenues of US companies like Qualcomm and instead favour French (boo!) and European manufacturers. (Whoops Siemens appears to be a German GSm manufacturer).

There are, of course, massive holes in Issa's arguments. For a start, Motorola is the world's second largest supplier of handsets - both cdmaOne and GSM - and appears to be an American company as far as we can tell.

Secondly, Qualcomm makes chips for GSM handsets which are being used by a variety of international handset manufacturers including Samsung. Thirdly, the last time American politicians intervened in Asia over the use of cdmaOne technology was in China.

China agreed to use both GSM and cdmaOne and Qualcomm then promptly sold its CDMA infrastructure to Ericsson (Swedish and another European country). Issa also says that North Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan are the last three big untapped cellular markets.

Unfortunately for him, Afghanistan already has a GSM network which is expanding rapidly. Congressman Issa might find an unexpected ally in South Korea, however.

That country already has a cdmaOne network and was planning to help its neighbour acquire the same technology. That proposal was blocked - by the US military which had no interest in seeing 'military' technology fall into enemy hands.

You can see why. As Issa says, "If US relief workers in Iraq are equipped with CDMA cell phones with GPS, they will be immediately locatable in case of terrorist attack or kidnapping." So if those cell phones fell into enemy hands?

Issa also doesn't appear to know that cdmaOne relies on the US GPS system for its infrastructure to function correctly. So for such phones to work in Iraq it would have to allow nationwide access to GPS. We think not. µ

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