There are a lot of industries that suffer from "acronymania" but few have the depth, history and downright silliness you'll find in the wireless industry.  If you want to understand what the clerk in the phone store is talking about, or why your phone won't work overseas, or just want to know the history behind some of these abbreviations so that you can win the occasional bar bet (thus the "profit" in the title of this post) you've come to the right place. 

After 25+ years in the wireless industry I've taken to awarding the "acro-nut prize of the day" to the person who uses the most acronyms in one sentence on either a conference call or a written article.  Even now, I'm blown away occasionally at level of compression used by some people within the industry as they speak... and even more astonished that listeners/readers (including myself) actually understand this stuff.  But we do and it's just because it's like learning to speak another language; as I've told many parents of teenagers who can do things on their phones and computers with dexterity and speed that the next generation can only dream about, these kids have been brought up in to "speak digital." 

There are a few that are pretty commonly used and are likely to be somewhat mysterious to the everyday cell phone user so let's tackle those first to give you a leg up in your next conversation with someone who speaks in the native language of wireless geeks. 

Let's start with a fun one that's really basic:

GSM

AT&T/Cingular uses it, T-Mobile uses it, 80% of all the cell phones in the world use it.  So just what is "it"?  GSM is a worldwide standard that manufacturers of phones, infrastructure equipment, services and other related technologies use to make sure that all the stuff they make works together.  Imagine if Toyotas, BMWs, Hondas and Fords all needed different types of gas and, consequently, there were different gas stations for each brand of car... what a mess that would be!  It's just like that in the cell phone industry, too - it's the "standards" that keep everything working together peacefully and GSM is the most commonly used cell phone standard.  The red dots on the map shown here represent areas where GSM coverage is available.

OK, but what does GSM mean?  Most of the people in the world couldn't tell you what the acronym GSM stands for, and of those that can, I can absolutely guarantee you that 99.9% of them will get it wrong.  Now, I'm not saying that you won't meet the occasional historian who will know, but I'll wager (and I have, actually, wagered) that most people don't konw what it stands for.  Here's the answer:

Most people will tell you that GSM stands for "Global System for Mobile Communications" and, for the last 20 years or so, it has.  But that's not what GSM originally stood for - the acronym "GSM" actually stood for "Groupe Speciale Mobile," which was the engineering working group, based in France, that worked on developing the technological specifications for the standard now in use worldwide.  When the standard became popularized the industry needed (or wanted) a way to anglicize the name of the standard, so they substituted the words "Global System for Mobile Communication" instead of "Group Speciale Mobile," allowing the terms to reflect the same thing while keeping the acronym the same. 

SIM Cards

You've heard the term numerous times before, but do you really know what a "SIM" card is?  The term "SIM" stands for "Subscriber Identification Module" and it is a small chip that contains all of your account information and, in many cases, the information that you would otherwise store on your phone, such as speed dial numbers.  The beauty of a SIM card - which is only available on GSM systems, by the way - is that you can take the card from one phone and move it to another. 

(That's quite convenient, actually, as I can testify.  I have an iPhone and bike regularly - the first day that I had the phone I was anxious to take it with me and show it off to my biking buddies... so I did and cracked the screen when I put it into my saddlebag with the screen facing the wrong direction.  Talk about being bummed out!  Well, the guy at the Apple store took pity on me replaced the phone but I swore to him - and myself - that I wouldn't take that phone with me biking again.  So now when I bike I take the SIM out of iPhone and put it into a sturdy RAZR to stick in the saddlebag.)

So, SIM = Subscriber Identification Module... the chip where all your account information is stored.  When you put the chip into any phone, it becomes your phone.  

CDMA

If you're a subscriber of either Verizon or Sprint you're using CDMA but may not know it.  CDMA is a technology that was developed long ago in one of Hollywood's most unusual stories - involving, of all people, Hedy Lamarr.  At a dinner party during World War II, Ms. Lamarr, an accomplished pianist, conceived a method that would allow control over torpedos at great distances without enemy detection or jamming.  The method, literally sketched out on the back of a cocktail napkin, ultimately became a military standard.  Years later, Qualcomm made use of the standard in a different way, to increase the capacity of cellular phone systems.  They referred to the technology as "CDMA" or "Code Division Multiple Access."  

What, however, does CDMA actually mean?  It is a way of coding conversations so that many conversations can occur simultaneously on one radio channel without interfering with each other.  Imagine a party where there are 20 people carrying on conversations as couples, at the same time, in 10 different languages.  Even though they can all hear each other, they "tune out" the other conversations because they are focused on speaking and listening in the one language that they have chosen.  That's the way that CDMA works - although it's a little more complicated than that if you grasp that concept you've pretty much got it. 

So that's today's "acronymania" lesson for today.  More on the industry's crazy alphabet soup in the future - and more about the technologies that they refer to.