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If there's good competition between mobile networks then it's in their interest to stick up a mast near a remote university. Many people at that university will switch to that network, if it's the only option.

There's 2G coverage almost everywhere, but not necessarily on all networks.

If you do live in an area with no coverage you could get something like this, which claims to give you 2G and 3G signal in your home using your broadband connection. It's a shame that's only for Vodafone (UK), as everyone would benefit if the networks cooperated on this.

There are also temporary GSM towers at major (remote) events (music festivals, races etc).

According to this map (I think made by the same people) coverage is better if you combine all the networks' coverage. Scotland still misses out, but when considering the whole UK there really aren't that many rural people in Scotland.

(The percentage of British people who live in Scotland but don't live in the Central Belt or in a town is quite small.)

Note that there is 2G coverage everywhere (IME not on all networks, but almost always at least one network).

Attention Google: if you want Android to challenge Apple, you have to get it on Verizon. Verizon is the only company with an infrastructure that can kick AT&T in the teeth.

This is a US only issue, Google are looking at the entire world. Android is not doing badly in the US (1 million G1's sold in the first six months) but mobile (cellular) networks are better built and better regulated in the rest of the world which is why Australia and Europe have all four Android phones whilst the US has just released it's second.

Here is a 3G coverage map of the world and 21 MB PDF of the same map. Brown in 2G and yellow is 3G, Europe and Australia have greater coverage of 3G then the US. Even Indonesia and Malaysia have better coverage and lets not even look at Japan or Korea.

Oh dear, someone clearly has a new 3G phone and thinks everyone should dump that old stuff. Because it's old. Nobody likes old technology! It has to be new and flash!

Yeah. Try to attack me with the good old "That guy thinks that old is worse than new and is thus an idiot!!" attack as if that would have been what I said. It occasionally works in front of the /. audience. But honestly, how about you stop being so arrogant dick and actually stop to think about it for a moment? Let's try that for a while.

A new and shiny 3G phone? Yeah, my phone is only about a year old as my previous phone got broken after years of use. But honestly... Every phone you can buy these days is a 3G phone. Maybe you can find one or two extremely cheap models that aren't but I feel confident to say that it won't be the case in three years.

I suggest you educate yourself before criticising a technology that has served the world (as well as the U.S.) for a good several decades.

And more arrogance with more "facts".

Apart from video calls and high-speed internet access, GSM does everything that 3G does. For many people, voice calls and text messaging is still what they use a mobile phone for.

Well, same could be said about any new technology. Hell, e-mail is just like regular mail apart from faster speed. But the networks aren't just for phones either. With the coming of netbooks and other cheap laptops, Kindle and such devices, mobile internet access is getting more and more important in addition to video calls and such. It is a great improvement and GSM simply can't give us that.

So we get to the point that operators will have (and in a lot of places, they already do) both GSM and 3G systems in place. It certainly isn't in their interest to support two technologies simultaneously unless they really have to. And at the point where practically all phones in use are 3G compliant anyways (I predicted this to be 5-10 years away), they won't have to. Of course they'll want to drop one of the technologies.

Mobile phone use is taking off in poorer parts of the world because it's cheaper and simpler to set up towers that can serve hundreds (thousands?) of people across a large area than run telephone lines to every single house ("leapfrogging"). This software (OpenBSC) could certainly be of use in these parts of the world.

I completely agree. Wireless is better in such places. The question is simply... What kind of wireless will it be. 3G offers all the same things and much more than 2G so unless 3G is significantly costlier to deploy, it will prevail. And I doubt that after building the towers, etc. necessary, there will be any significant cost difference when choosing between 2G and 3G. Especially some years from now.

UMTS, a 3G technology, uses GSM's Mobile Access Part (MAP) and voice codecs. It's basically GSM with a new air interface. Handsets using UMTS can also use 'old' GSM when there's no 3G coverage.

So this development effort will not be for naught in the 3G world. They'll just have to find some new hardware that does UMTS and will continue working.

If your post had simply consisted of those lines, it would have been pretty good.

I suggest you educate yourself before criticising a technology that has served the world (as well as the U.S.) for a good several decades.

UMTS, a 3G technology, uses GSM's Mobile Access Part (MAP) and voice codecs. It's basically GSM with a new air interface. Handsets using UMTS can also use 'old' GSM when there's no 3G coverage.

Actually, you should educate yourself beyond skimming Wiki articles.

GSM has been around only since the early 90s (less than 2 decades).

Saying UMTS is "basically GMTS with a new air interface" is completely misleading. GSM is an FDMA / TDMA hybrid, meaning the channels are allocated across frequency but each channel can support multiple time-multiplexed voice streams. UMTS is most commonly CDMA direct sequence spread spectrym, which is an entirely different multiple access method than FDMA / TDMA. All users communicate over the entire spectrum simultaneously, where a unique spreading code provides interference mitigation (processing gain) at the receiver. In addition to different access methods, GSM and UMTS also use different modulation methods (GSM is a spectrally efficient MSK, UMTS is QPSK I believe.

In short, they are entirely different from a telecom standpoint. Multi-mode phones can support both standards only because the RF frequencies are sufficiently close and they have completely separate processing algorithms for each built-in, not because there's a wealth of technical similarities between the two standards. Adoption of the same voice codec is a trivial similarity.

Oh dear, someone clearly has a new 3G phone and thinks everyone should dump that old stuff. Because it's old. Nobody likes old technology! It has to be new and flash!

I suggest you educate yourself before criticising a technology that has served the world (as well as the U.S.) for a good several decades. Apart from video calls and high-speed internet access, GSM does everything that 3G does. For many people, voice calls and text messaging is still what they use a mobile phone for. Mobile phone use is taking off in poorer parts of the world because it's cheaper and simpler to set up towers that can serve hundreds (thousands?) of people across a large area than run telephone lines to every single house ("leapfrogging"). This software (OpenBSC) could certainly be of use in these parts of the world.

UMTS, a 3G technology, uses GSM's Mobile Access Part (MAP) and voice codecs. It's basically GSM with a new air interface. Handsets using UMTS can also use 'old' GSM when there's no 3G coverage.

So this development effort will not be for naught in the 3G world. They'll just have to find some new hardware that does UMTS and will continue working.

If by "third world" you mean most of the world, then yes. Otherwise you're a stupid troll.

Well, a very, very significant percentage of the world uses GSM, but it looks like there are still a few countries lacking it

http://www.worldtimezone.com/gsm.html & http://coveragemaps.com/gsmposter_world.htm

And Europe too.

World map of GSM coverage, Jan 2008:
http://www.coveragemaps.com/gsmposter_world.htm

There are some coverage maps here. The world map has a big yellow 3G blob over Europe, but not the USA. The detailed European map shows almost universal GSM coverage (even in middle-of-nowhere places) and 3G isn't limited to cities. (The detailed USA map is a couple of years old, so it's difficult to compare directly.)

Looks like Russia is well covered by GSM:

http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/cou_ru.shtml
http://www.worldtimezone.com/gsm.html
http://www.coveragemaps.com/gsmposter_europe.htm

Peace!

Actually only the cell-phones in the US are half-ass web featured ones. Two years ago, the coolest cell in the US was the brain-dead, RAZR, granted it was sexy, but it was also brain-dead. On the other side of the planet, there were touch-screen phones that ran Linux and had Opera 7.5 as a pretty decent browser. They still rule because they can run Doom and Quake, and can render most pages without a problem. Come to think about-it, most of what the iPhone brings, you can get from a Nokia N800 with a basic GSM phone that also has Bluetooth in parallel. Actually the N800 is a lot better than the iPhone. I have an excelent IMAP client on it (Claws), I have Pidgin for IM, I have a very decent Opera 9 with flash and a lot of other goodies. The great thing about-it is that it only takes an incredibly small amount of time to port ANY gtk application to the Maemo platform that the N800 uses. The multitude of applications that have been ported to the N800 only proves that it's a better platform than most of the others.

I will give the iPhone the following:
1) Multi-touch. It sounds like it's more than a simple touch-screen. The Nokia N800 has a nice feature that detects if you touch with the stick or a finger and adjusts the input method and the menus accordingly, but I doubt that it's as cool as the one on the iPhone. I am sure that the Nokia N800+1 could easily implement something like this.
2) Screen rotation sensor.
3) Phone

Flame follows: (3) is actually one that can be put in both good and bad. The iPhone is an Edge phone on a 3G world. Granted that the network coverage for 3G in the US is a joke compared to Europe or Asia. Actually, the network coverage in the US is more like a joke. In Romania, the country that only a few years ago was under communist ruling, we have basically 100% coverage for the cell phone networks, and a lot of 3G, and nation-wide GPRS on Vodaphone (they are introducing 7.something Mbps HSUPA later this year) and EDGE on Orange (same as Vodafone). Vodafone currently has 2.8 Mbps HSDPA, and Orange has 3.6 Mbps HSDPA. In Germany it's even more impressing, you have almost full 3G coverage for the whole country.

Zapp, our only CDMA operator, has EVDO 2.4 Mbps since 2004, and they are going for an upgrade later this year. Now, allow me to be disappointed by the lame EDGE options available to the US market. I am also disappointed by the fact that Apple didn't allow the buying of unlocked phones and gave AT&T exclusivity.

BTW: The rates for Cell phone is the US are also huge. In 2005, a prepaid card from Cingular gave me "free calls" in the US, but having to pay an airtime rate of $.25/min for both outgoing and incoming calls. In Romania in 2005 the prepaid rates were somewhere around $.20 for outgoing calls, and free for incoming. I also found the fact that you get charged from the second that you make the call, even if the other party doesn't answer, to be a little disturbing, especially since a call to Romania costed around $.90 + airtime tax, and would usually take around 45s to connect to the Bucharest based operators. I've called Cingular and asked for my money back for the situations in which it didn't connect at all. Based on their pricing details I expected to be charged $0.25 in that minute until the person answers and until the call connects, and after that $0.25 + $0.90 for the call, but I was charged almost an extra dollar for each call. I find this wierd because in Europe, if the person doesn't answer, you don't pay anything, and if you receive a call (except for roaming), you don't pay anything. In the US, if someone hates you they simply have to send you a lot of Text messages, because they also cost if you receive them.

Anyway, to make a long story short, in the US the mobile phones are a lot more expensive and dumb (literally), the rates are a lot worst and the network coverage is a joke. This is coming from a guy that lives in Romania, not in the UK or France or Germany. I talk my ass off on my cell phone (and we all have a cell phone), and I never exceed than $45, except when I'm out of the country.

Coverage information is available at Coverage Maps.

Forget the U.S. with its backward mix of cellphone networks. Most of the rest of the world uses GSM, often with easy roaming. Put a SIM card into this phone and it will work almost anywhere across Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, South America, or the Pacific.

More than likely no, but if you really need access out in those areas, then there are satellite options, although I'm sure they are cost prohibitive for most situations.

GSM Coverage Maps:
http://www.coveragemaps.com/gsmposter.htm