> True. I was told by a contact at ETSI (the organisation that defined
>> many of the GSM standards) that this was originally an oversight --
>> they had not realised that the modulation scheme was effectively 100%
>> amplitude modulation, which would be "detected" by any rectifying
>> circuit nearby. It caused a lot of consternation in the early days.
>> The "solution" they eventually agreed was to reduce the power
>> transmitted by the phones by a factor of 10. This had been proposed
>> anyway, to reduce the cell size and hence increase system capacity
>> (also to increase battery life).
> So GSM that we have today is a patch on top a patch. Nice to think about > that.
But the 3G migration path for GSM is UMTS, also known as W-CDMA. It does not use time division multiplexing; instead it uses a version of CDMA that occupies 5 MHz down- and upstream (as opposed to cdma2000, EV- DO, etc., which use 1.25 MHz down- and upstream per channel). Thus, eventually the buzzing side-effect of GSM will disappear.