Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 13:48:07 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> 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: <20010122134807.O3066@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <v04220828b69148fa75d9@[10.0.1.2]>; from brad.knowles@skynet.be on Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 03:37:24AM %2B0100 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> <v04220828b69148fa75d9@[10.0.1.2]>
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On Monday, 22 January 2001 at 3:37:24 +0100, Brad Knowles wrote: > 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? Sorry, I phrased that wrongly. I was comparing the mobile phone coverage without intending to refer to a specific system. >> 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.... That depends on the situation. What I've seen is that some carriers have better coverage than others; I've seen very few cases where the "good" carrier has significant holes which could be filled by a different carrier. >> 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.... A SIM is a whole lot cheaper. If I go to China or Malaysia on business, I can borrow a local SIM from the office and use that. Alternatively I can use prepaid SIMs. > 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. Well, in my home country there's exactly one carrier who services the Outback worth talking about, and that's Telstra. The situation is different from the USA, where there are a number of regional providers. I think the USA may be the only country in the world to have regional providers. But that's not the issue. >> 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. Voice mail? Email? SMS is limited to about 240 characters. > Unfortunately, alpha-numeric pagers simply never caught on over > here. I don't see anything unfortunate about that. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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