Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 03:37:24 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@peorth.iteration.net>, Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.ORG>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mobile phone coverage (was: VCD (was Re: cvs commit: src/sys/dev/ata atapi-cd.c)) Message-ID: <v04220828b69148fa75d9@[10.0.1.2]> In-Reply-To: <20010122123223.K3066@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <200101211447.f0LElEk04073@mobile.wemm.org> <KAECKEJJOLGHAFGGNIKMAELICAAA.res02jw5@gte.net> <20010121145018.A73989@citusc17.usc.edu> <20010121165422.A44505@peorth.iteration.net> <v04220821b691222656eb@[10.0.1.2]> <20010121181251.B44819@peorth.iteration.net> <v04220825b6912c57be5b@[10.0.1.2]> <20010122123223.K3066@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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At 12:32 PM +1030 2001/1/22, Greg Lehey wrote: > A more obvious comparison would be between the USA and Australia. > I've noticed significantly worse GSM coverage in Silicon Valley than > in Adelaide SA. Sure, but GSM coverage in the US is already known to be crappy, so this is no real surprise. Now, have you compared GSM coverage in those areas to TDMA or CDMA coverage? > It's a question of flexibility. The phone numbers are on the cards, > and you don't "constantly" switch phones. No, but if you run into a situation where you can't get coverage on your current carrier, you'd either have to switch SIMs in the phone you have, or switch phones. Since you could leave three phones on all the time, it would be a lot easier to just put down one phone and pick up another, and never have either of them turned off which you're switching SIMs, etc.... > My scenario was when moving > from one country to another. CDMA works in Korea, Israel and > Australia; how would you get local access rates there with your CDMA > phone and American NAMs? When moving from one country to another, assuming you're not in a place like Europe where you could expect your current phone to continue to work, then obviously you'd have to buy a new phone, with a new carrier, a new service contract, etc.... I'm talking about the situation where you're out in the boonies in your home country, and you can't get coverage on your primary carrier. In this case, you have relatively few options available to you if the various carriers within that country do not have roaming arrangements between them. > I haven't seen a necessity to switch at all in a single country. I > know Belgium's not very big, but it still takes over an hour to drive > through from North to South. And about two hours East/West. Yet, there are still plenty of places in the more mountainous regions where you can't get coverage from one carrier but probably can with another, and you can also find "dead" spots within even major city areas where one provider has good coverage and another doesn't. > It works in Australia. But SMS is a toy. Like it or not, in Europe SMS is effectively the only way to be able to send pages to people, so if you're a sysadmin, your alternatives are pretty much zilch. Unfortunately, alpha-numeric pagers simply never caught on over here. Myself, I much prefer to leave my phone off all the time (turning it on only when I need it), and saving the battery as much as possible. Contrariwise, the battery in a decent alpha-numeric pager should last months. Using an alpha-numeric pager in combination with a phone also gives me the option to control when I respond to a page, and people expect that if they call my cell phone, it probably won't be on unless I'm using it or expecting a call. I just don't like handing out my cell phone number to everybody and their bloody brother. Unfortunately, in Europe there are relatively few alternatives, if you want to be able to be reached when you are not home. > None of your arguments relate to the technical differences. Perhaps not, but I can say that all the CDMA networks I know of are implemented in a manner I much prefer, in comparison to the way all GSM networks I know of. As a consumer of portable digital networking/telephony products (and not an engineer helping to design them), it's hard to tell what implementation differences are caused by the underlying technology, and what is caused by sheer asinine management stupidity. However, since the labels for these different solutions/products/technologies that I have available to me are relatively limited, I will use what I am aware of. >> Fortunately, I won't have to wait too long before everything over >> here will be CDMA, > > You must know something that I don't. I asked you before for details. 3G. It'll be a few years, but all of Europe is in the process of auctioning off 3G licenses, and this will supplant GSM. Of course, I now realize that this will be based on CDMA technology, but will probably still have the same asinine management stupidity principles applied to it, and therefore the customer experience is likely to be little different from what we have today. ;-( > By then, all these stupid little national carriers will have been > bought out by multinational companies who will decide on roaming > arrangements based only on their guesses of commercial viability. You > even have that now in a country the size of Belgium. That's what > you're really complaining about, after all. No, they're trying to see how much they can piss in each others canteens while trying to protect their own, all the while they're ignoring the train wreck that is hurtling their way. I can only hope that once they've all been bought and shredded that all the old management forons will be eating their Fried Green Swiss Alps Oysters and enjoying the taste. -- These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy ====================================================================== Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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