From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Jan 22 15:11: 1 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mta06-svc.ntlworld.com (mta06-svc.ntlworld.com [62.253.162.46]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D0E4A37B6BB; Mon, 22 Jan 2001 15:10:42 -0800 (PST) Received: from dmlb.org ([62.253.135.104]) by mta06-svc.ntlworld.com (InterMail vM.4.01.02.27 201-229-119-110) with ESMTP id <20010122230050.MOJV285.mta06-svc.ntlworld.com@dmlb.org>; Mon, 22 Jan 2001 23:00:50 +0000 Received: from dmlb by dmlb.org with local (Exim 3.03 #1) id 14KpxB-0000lj-00; Mon, 22 Jan 2001 23:00:49 +0000 Content-Length: 1700 Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.3 [p0] on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 23:00:49 -0000 (GMT) From: Duncan Barclay To: Brad Knowles Subject: Re: Mobile phone coverage (was: VCD (was Re: cvs commit: src/sys Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, Kris Kennaway , Michael C.Wu , Greg Lehey Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On 22-Jan-01 Brad Knowles wrote: >> 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. In the UK kids use SMS as it is much cheaper than the cost of a voice call. Most kids have them on pre-paid at silly costs - close to $1/minute. SMS is closer to $0.15/message. > 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. Actually, 3G will coexist with GSM. All the main European carriers have stated that they will only roll out 3G in urban areas. Duncan --- ________________________________________________________________________ Duncan Barclay | God smiles upon the little children, dmlb@dmlb.org | the alcoholics, and the permanently stoned. dmlb@freebsd.org| Steven King To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message