Slashdot Mirror

At first, it seems that the solution portrayed in the article would make the deployment of GSM networks easier and cheaper. This would not only be a solution for developing countries, but also for rural areas in western countries. An illustration of this last point is readily made by comparing the GSM coverage of a densely populated country like The Netherlands (former state provider KPN) to that of a much more sparsely populated country like the US (AT&T wireless).

However, GSM is not the only cell-phone standard there is. Another standard which is often used in rural areas is CDMA. It seems this standard features larger cells, and fewer base stations (for, of course, a less densely populated cell). Indeed, Verizon has plans to convert parts of its network to CDMA: see here.

Does anybody have altual experience with deploying CDMA networks? (obviously, given the coverage map for GSM, I don't need that experience in Holland ;)

Actually most of the world aren't on 3G.

This link shows which networks offer 3G

And don't make the common problem of confusing of 2.5G with 3G

IMHO, it all boils down to the question whether China really is the market of the future. Sure, it has a large population, and there are currently no mobile phones.

Sounds like you've never been to China or aren't in touch with the state of affairs of the country. When China decided to put in place a telephone infrastructre they went wireless, simply because it was the cheapest and fastest way to provide access to such a large teritory. To give you an idea of the coverage, check out the coverage map of China Mobile Communication Corp. Most people I met in China had mobile phones. In fact the coverage over there makes the setup in North America look terrible.

Actually there is a rather open standard at your disposal.

T-Mobile: These guys actually have a decent priced unlimited plan at $29.00 a month. BUT, it looks like their speeds are limited to around 56k. I'd really like more speed, but I suppose that's the trade off for the cheap price.

I've looked at T-Mobile myself. IIRC, that $30/month isn't an all-you-can-eat plan. And the additional bandwidth charges are pretty steep. It might be affordable for checking your email on the road, provided you configure your client not to download everything every time you check.

The right keyword for Googling cellular data service is GPRS. I personally consider GPRS to be the only cellular data technology worth paying attention to. Though maybe I'm just prejudiced against CDMA-based data services because U.S.-only wireless standards are a major pain.

If you must have a lot of bandwidth on the road, you should consider signing up with a Wireless Hotspot service. Then all you have to do is schlep your way to the nears Borders or Starbucks (neither is in the Gobi Desert yet, but I think they're working on it), plug in your WiFi card, and surf. Or you could just get the WiFi card and look for Free Hotspots or other open networks.

For CDMA2000 family and GSM, I think all can be deduced from this page.
Apparently everyone (ETSI for GSM, TIA for CDMA2000) trie to get together for having a 3G which would have enabled compatibility between the two. But apparently due to lengthy process, they decided to fork a 3GPP2 focused on cdma2000. But they are using on their slides, some GSM terms (HLR, VLR), so they are somehow compatible at the end.

For the EU :

GSM : A little bit more complex. It started in 'ad-hoc groups' (CEPT create GSM, then Groupe Speciale Mobile), then the operators (which were state monopolies at that time) pressured the commission (see here).

3G : License attribution method was the decision of the state members. UK, DE had awful auction while BE,FR,CH didn't and sold license for 'normal' prices (well high, but not astronomical).

The issue with GSM was that Qualcomm 'sponsored' a senator to do its bidding. CDMA is Qualcomm's technology and they have been campaigning to get the US government to implement CDMA is Iraq. If this move does go ahead, it would be a clear indication that the US presence there is only about helping Iraq, if they happen to the US's interests. And in the case of CDMA, it would be only one company's interests. GSM is not owned by any company, but is an independent organisation establish the technology to be used for mobile communication. Also, given the larger world wide coverage of GSM, CDMA would not be Iraq's best interests. If there are only three companies in the US making GSM phones (, it because the rest opt not to. BTW GSM is a technology umbrella, not a single tecnology, there have already been discussions as to including W-CDMA as part of the package.

One interesting link worth visiting, with regards to Iraq, is here.

I know this is rant, though I am not sure its because I back GSM, or whether it is because politics seem to be deciding what the market place should be deciding for itself.

According the the GSM World Association, more than 1 billion SMS (10^9) are sent every day worldwide. Also, the usage doubles every year.

SMS Stats

GSM is a digital standard in Europe, and many other countries. "GSM for Iraq!" by the way :-|

GSM.
SMS/MMS.

Some of my tutors have seen the logic port prototypes of the first GSM phone, and that took several trollies to cart around.
Then they were able to make a portable version. Well, portable, I guess it weighed over 10 kg, and was carried in a "backpack" configuration. Like those field radioes you see in Vietnam war movies, only twice as big and heavy.
I saw a picture of one guy on a testing trip with that thing on, and cross country skis, visiting a cabin in Norway. He'd better stay on his feet. Ouch! Not to mention all the damaged tech.....

GSM? WHICH GSM? Africa, US or European frequency?

GSM not as universal as most think.

GSM? WHICH GSM? Africa, US or European frequency?

GSM not as universal as most think.

"Congressman Issa's intervention that GSM is an 'outdated French standard' is as ill-timed as it is misinformed. At the moment our first priority must be to offer our support and sympathies to the people putting their lives on the line to liberate Iraq.

The right time to debate the technology will be when the real conflict is over. And at that time we should look at the real facts, not the Congressman's ill advised opinion. To suggest that GSM is simply a European or French standard is, in the current climate, quite outrageous.

GSM stands for 'Global System for Mobile Communications' and its users can roam throughout the world on the same phone with the same number.

GSM is used by almost one billion consumers and on every continent of the world, with 550 operators across 193 countries.

GSM is a worldwide standard accounting for 72 per cent of the digital wireless market today.

GSM is an 'open standard', which means any manufacturer from any country can make GSM equipment on a 'level playing field' - including North American companies such as Motorola, Lucent and Nortel. Global manufacturers supporting this open standard include Samsung, Panasonic, NEC, Toshiba, Nokia, Ericsson, Mitsubishi, Siemens and many more.

Major network operators in the USA offer GSM services such as AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, T-Mobile USA and in Canada it is provided by Microcell.

GSM is already deployed in every country of the Middle East region - CDMA is not deployed in any.

GSM was installed in Afghanistan post-war by an American company (TSI of New York) after a full tender process.
Today, there are more than 20 Arab countries with GSM networks and 60 million customers in the region. Iraq, of course, has been under UN Sanctions and therefore has not been able to purchase GSM technology.

Therefore, the suggestion that CDMA technology be deployed in Iraq post war is completely at odds with the rest of the region and the majority of the world. It would add to the country's isolation and arguably be at odds with the overall war effort.

I can't believe someone has started this debate at this time, and I certainly can't believe it has been started from such a false position and on such nationalistic terms."

What should also be looked at is the incredible world-wide coverage given by GSM. I think it it would be very short-sighted to be using CDMA when there is already a well established global standard. When rebuilding any country you should be helping the inhabitants, NOT the paying ransom money to the country that 'liberated', the country in question.

It is true that GSM was put together by European cell phone companies, but they did not want to repeat the mistake of the old incompatible analogue systems.

Most CDMA phones manufactured these days are in fact feature reduced GSM phones, and old models. While Qualcomm seems to insist on sticking to CDMA. Most cell phone manufacturers put their effort into the GSM range, which has a world-wide market: Motorola, Handspring, Alcatel, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Sagem, Sendo, Siemens, NEC and Sony Ericsson.

If Qualcomm finds it too expensive to switch to GSM, then it should fork out the cost for building the wireless system in Iraq, NOT the US tax payer. Since in the long run in a GLOBAL market GSM provides a level playing field for everyone to make better products upon. Infrastructure is best without fragmentation, so that the real competition can exist above it!

The official gsm site and maps is at: http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/index.shtm l

There is a remarkable phenmenom with technical acronyms.

Thier meaning shifts over time. Mainly this is because the technology they describe becomes successful and the meaning of the orginal expansion is no longer valid. However the acronym is firmly rooted almost like a brand name, so usually the expansion is changed.

For instance VHS did originally expand to Vertical Helical Scan - which is a description of the way that the enigineering team solved how keep the tape speed over the head high without having to have the tape itself spooling at hig speed and therefor needing a huge amount of it.

Later as it became popular and mass market the expansion changed to Video Home System as this was more understandable for the consumer.

Video Home System (a less daunting rendering of the original acronym, which stood for Vertical Helical Scan)
Reference : Baird to MPEG A History Of Video

Look at the GSM mobile phone standard. Orignially this stood for Group Spécial Mobile - a special interest of the CEPT set up to develop one digital standard, based on the existing ISDN standard,for mobile phones in Europe to replace the mess of competing analogue ones.

Nowadays, given the massive success of the standard the expansion is Global System for Mobile communications .

DECT originally stood for Digital European Cordless Terminal . For the non Europeans its a standard for short range digital handset to base station communication for cordless phones. Being a standard you can now buy extra handsets from whoever you want, and things like wireless modems. As its success took off and it began to be used outside of Europe then the expansion changed to Digital Enhanced Cordless Terminal

As mentioned elsewher in this thread DVD originally stood for Digital Video Disc but as it became apparent that a high capacity replacement for CD could have many uses it was renamed to Digital Versatile Disc with the convention that the specific use is tagged afterwards, hence DVD-Video, DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, DVD-Audio The moral of the story is be careful what you state an acronym stands for - a whole load of them in daily use have stood for a number of things in thier history!!

Oh, and yes I do currently work in the telecoms side of it, how did you guess??

SMS was one revenue source for mobile providers, will camera phones become another?

...if camera phones will become the next direly awaited revenue source for the carriers, but there's one significant difference in those "products":

GSM was really, really smart engineering, which took off because the various stakeholders (wireless carriers, handset manufacturers, network equipment providers) pooled their resources and ideas and achieved a great standard which served everybody (even, if not most the users).

SMS was actually a byproduct of that standard and nobody had an idea how much it would take off. It's immensly successful and a nice source of additional revenue for the carriers.

Camera phones however seems more to be a product of marketing cree^H^H^H^Hexperts in the sense that they try to create a need, which otherwise doesn't exist.

Of course every industry player is very interested in multimedia messaging to succeed. The manufacturers like to sell new, snazzy and expensive phones, carriers charge an arm and a leg and have a huge interest in mms taking off and network equipment providers can sell nice upgrades to the wireless infrastructure.

Now if the consumers play nice, or if this is another wap fiasko in the making only time will tell.

I can neither confirm nor deny this, all I know is that everyone here used to have a landline but now people are giving them up because there is very little use for one.

> Perhaps some of the Euros can give us an example of pricing of POTS vs. cellular?

Where I live (Helsinkin area in Finland)
POTS (local): 12c for call setup, then 1c/min + 15 monthly fee
POTS (ld): normal local fees + additional 5c/min
GSM: 10-20c/min + 5 montly fee.
So I guess it's pretty competitive, but it you like to talk a lot landline will definately be cheaper.

> Another reason could also be that Europeans live in denser clusters than we do in the US. Takes less towers to cover the majority of the population.

I'm sure it's a significant factor but doesn't entirely explain it. For example the population density of Finland is only 16.9 persons/sqkm, whereas for United States the number is 29.8. Yet the network coverage here is almost 100%.

As nice as you landline theory is, I have a another idea

As nice as you landline theory is, I have a another idea

If you look at the GSM coverage map of China you will see that it has a large coverage for country so large. From what I undestand the reason for this, which is along the lines of the last mile, is that China did not have any cabled phone network covering that area to start with. Since it was going to cost them as much to wire such a large area and that mobile phones were growing in popularity they decided to go the wireless approach.

The reason I bring the story up, is because once you are in a rural area it becomes increasingly more expensive to connect to homes. The problem is that you get less inhabitants per length of telephone cable, thus making it extremely more expensive short and long term. The long term cost is the inspection of such a coverage of phone lines. The wireless approach allows a much larger area to be covered, and it ends up being cheaper as there is there are less inspection points. It also provides the advantage that the phone company also gets money from visitors to the area and not just the inhabitants. Additionaly, for a farmer, this is great as it allows him/her to phone home when they are somewhere in the middle of their land. This sort of solution could be easily applied to other countries with the last 100 miles problem, not just the last mile.

The only question I ask myself, is whether there are any solutions for solar powered transmission towers?

Just had to take a look, here are maps for the four operators in Denmark:

• TDC Mobil
• Sonofon
• Telia
• Orange

And of cause you can roam to another operator, if your own cannot provide service (just like you roam in the rest of Europe).

Just had to take a look, here are maps for the four operators in Denmark:

• TDC Mobil
• Sonofon
• Telia
• Orange

And of cause you can roam to another operator, if your own cannot provide service (just like you roam in the rest of Europe).

Just had to take a look, here are maps for the four operators in Denmark:

• TDC Mobil
• Sonofon
• Telia
• Orange

And of cause you can roam to another operator, if your own cannot provide service (just like you roam in the rest of Europe).

Just had to take a look, here are maps for the four operators in Denmark:

• TDC Mobil
• Sonofon
• Telia
• Orange

And of cause you can roam to another operator, if your own cannot provide service (just like you roam in the rest of Europe).

You should really see a mobile network coverage map of countries like Finland and Sweden.

And you have to remember these are only one operator. Each country has at least one other operator providing similar coverage and several others with all the main centres covered.

You should really see a mobile network coverage map of countries like Finland and Sweden.

And you have to remember these are only one operator. Each country has at least one other operator providing similar coverage and several others with all the main centres covered.

CDMA is a method of transmission, GSM is not. GSM is a collection of technologies for communication, of which transmission method is one of them. If GSM decided to include CDMA into GSM it would be possible, but it would not necessarily use the same data format across those frequences, nor the same frequency band. To find out more, see the GSM Technologies page.

They english translation says that it's targeted at European, Asian and North American markets however, being a 3-band GSM it means that it'll work quite everywhere in the world except in Japan: all across Africa for example, and in South America too.

As in the original article it'll be initially marketed in those 3 continents, but nothing prevents it from being sold and used anywhere else.

Curiously enough, non-GSM users are left out for now. Hopefully, at least in the North-American continent, the (late) conversion to GSM by AT&T will speed up the conversion of the last 30% of the world maket to the dominant global standard.

GSM and CDMA are the current contenders in the US, with VERY few GSM handsets offering analog (AMPS) capability. Verizon and Sprint are CDMA, T-Mobile (nee VoiceStream) is GSM. Cingular and AT&T are currently migrating from TDMA to GSM, I recommend avoiding them in their TDMA markets. (I sell these things, all carriers in the Philadelphia market, where both are currently TDMA, but AT&T migrates next month)

Nextel uses iDEN, standing alone. Good digital voice service, minimal data capabilities right now, but coverage density on par with the others. (mid-atlantic area, at least)

AMPS towers are no longer being maintained/built TTBOMK, but they still provide considerably more coverage geographically in the eastern US (don't know elsewhere) than any of the digital services.

If you can find a GSM/AMPS handset (and a carrier that will support both, or just GSM and emergency use on AMPS) then you will probably be well served. Otherwise look to Verizon's CDMA/AMPS network. Sprint has similar coverage, on a different frequency from Verizon [of course!] but their customer service and support practices are atrocious. (Like often $3 per customer service call, and shutting off service 2-3 days after activation!) If passing a credit check is a problem, see Sprint, otherwise move on.

If multinational roaming is in the cards, GSM is probably the only contender, (check gsmworld.com for lots of info) and more than half of the current T-Mobile handsets handle it. (3 motorola, 2 samsung)

j

Att is rolling out their west coast GPRS/GSM network in october, can't wait. {drool}

According to this GSM World article, security is not much of a problem any more. "A new security algorithm, known as A5/3, will provide users of GSM mobile phones with an even higher level of protection against eavesdropping than they have already. It will ensure that even if a prospective attacker manages to pull a GSM phone call out of the radio waves, he will be completely unable to make sense of it, even if he throws massive computing resources at the task.

GSM is an evoloving standard which incorporates all sort of sorts of technologies. Encryption could be added, but like any standard involving multiple parties, it will take time. There will always be pluses and minuses, though I like what GSM has to offer.

Following site has maps of GSM coverage in various countries

There have maps for some countries to compare:
USA
Tunisia
China
Vietnam

Following site has maps of GSM coverage in various countries

There have maps for some countries to compare:
USA
Tunisia
China
Vietnam

1. In USA there are 4-5 competing standards: that means that if you switch provider, you likely have to change your phone - anywhere else (curiously, except in Japan) there is GSM.
   In EU each country had its own standard so when you had to travel, your phone did not work anymore (I remember still in 1992 using an analog phone while sailing... nice, except when you reached another coast of the Mediterranean, you had no coverage anymore) . Since mobile phones are obviously useful when traveling, in 1987, GSM standard was defined and cellphone providers never looked back. BY 1993 it began to be implemented.
2. Anywhere else, except in the USA, you don't pay to receive calls - you don't have to choose a monthly-fee-based plan if you don't want to, and prepaid cards have similar cost to plans (and expire in 1 year, not in 1 month!). In brief, you pay only what you use!
3. In the USA you have to subscribe to a plan for a year, and if you unsubscribe, you pay huge penalties.

In any other market, similar threatening conditions would not be tolerated:

• would you agree to have your home phone service subject to a 1-yr min. contract, effectively preventing you from switching providers?
• would you like to have a TV market where you have to buy an new TV set (with a different video standard) if you move from NY to LA?
• would you like to have to pay for incoming long-distance phone calls at home?

With such conditions, it's not strange that the cellular phone market is in such a bad shape. It's surprising it's not in a worse one!

1. In USA there are 4-5 competing standards: that means that if you switch provider, you likely have to change your phone - anywhere else (curiously, except in Japan) there is GSM.
   In EU each country had its own standard so when you had to travel, your phone did not work anymore (I remember still in 1992 using an analog phone while sailing... nice, except when you reached another coast of the Mediterranean, you had no coverage anymore) . Since mobile phones are obviously useful when traveling, in 1987, GSM standard was defined and cellphone providers never looked back. BY 1993 it began to be implemented.
2. Anywhere else, except in the USA, you don't pay to receive calls - you don't have to choose a monthly-fee-based plan if you don't want to, and prepaid cards have similar cost to plans (and expire in 1 year, not in 1 month!). In brief, you pay only what you use!
3. In the USA you have to subscribe to a plan for a year, and if you unsubscribe, you pay huge penalties.

In any other market, similar threatening conditions would not be tolerated:

• would you agree to have your home phone service subject to a 1-yr min. contract, effectively preventing you from switching providers?
• would you like to have a TV market where you have to buy an new TV set (with a different video standard) if you move from NY to LA?
• would you like to have to pay for incoming long-distance phone calls at home?

With such conditions, it's not strange that the cellular phone market is in such a bad shape. It's surprising it's not in a worse one!

1. In USA there are 4-5 competing standards: that means that if you switch provider, you likely have to change your phone - anywhere else (curiously, except in Japan) there is GSM.
   In EU each country had its own standard so when you had to travel, your phone did not work anymore (I remember still in 1992 using an analog phone while sailing... nice, except when you reached another coast of the Mediterranean, you had no coverage anymore) . Since mobile phones are obviously useful when traveling, in 1987, GSM standard was defined and cellphone providers never looked back. BY 1993 it began to be implemented.
2. Anywhere else, except in the USA, you don't pay to receive calls - you don't have to choose a monthly-fee-based plan if you don't want to, and prepaid cards have similar cost to plans (and expire in 1 year, not in 1 month!). In brief, you pay only what you use!
3. In the USA you have to subscribe to a plan for a year, and if you unsubscribe, you pay huge penalties.

In any other market, similar threatening conditions would not be tolerated:

• would you agree to have your home phone service subject to a 1-yr min. contract, effectively preventing you from switching providers?
• would you like to have a TV market where you have to buy an new TV set (with a different video standard) if you move from NY to LA?
• would you like to have to pay for incoming long-distance phone calls at home?

With such conditions, it's not strange that the cellular phone market is in such a bad shape. It's surprising it's not in a worse one!

EDGE will offer about 3x the data rates of GPRS whilst still using similar technology. So, it would be around the 350 kbps mark in (very) good radio conditions. 3G technology (in the current delayed timeframe) is looking less revolutionary and more evolutionary all the time.

I'm a bit confused, though. Isn't this what GPRS is supposed to accomplish?

1. GSM -> GSM specifications -> SIM cards + Mobile phone (or pcmcia card or whatever) in order to have a mobile terminal

Is that true in the US or is a SIM card equivalent hardwired into the phone?

3. For the USA, well, you'll have to find a GSM network, prior to do that ;)

Using a tri-band phone there is a reasonable GSM network in the US which allows international roaming. But is it possible to buy SIM cards there or get temporary service (without a contract)?

Thanks,
-Bruce

PCS is NOT a frequency variant of GSM. PCS (Personal Communication Services) is the FCC definition for digital wireless services at the 1900 MHz bandwith range. This includes CDMA, TDMA, and GSM which run in North America at 1900 MHz as opposed to 800 MHz most everywhere else.

The problem here is not Europe being technologically superior the United States, but the fact that their mobile systems run at GSM 900 and 1800 MHz. GSM in the united states is exclusively 1900 MHz.

That being said, Nokia et. al. could easily retool their 800/1800 MHz GSM phones to work at 1900 MHz, but that's just part of the problem. Nokia doesn't sell directly to the consumer, and support is left to the provider, whose customers have a tendency to be more idiotic than their european counterparts.

Providers here have a hard enough time trying to teach Sally Chatterbox and Joe AOL how to use their digital phones, and here you have the other reason why you're not likely to see these kinds of mass-marketed advanced phones here.

Oh, so you mean they'll work anywhere in the entire world, except one country? I guess they ain't no use to anyone then. Darn it.

Sorry, I'm an American living in the US and I tend not to get excited about things until they're available in my own backyard. These phones are great, and I'm very excited about them, but I can't have one yet, and I don't plan to move to Asia/Europe just to have one.

Anyway, PCS is just a frequency variant of GSM, so to say that there are few GSM networks in the US is not really accurate.

Huh? So you're saying that I can just take my PCS phone to a GSM-only country, sign up for service w/a carrier and expect it to work? This is simply not true. In my original post, I provided a map of GSM coverage in the US by all carriers, check it out. Coverage is very sparse.

This is kool and the gang (esp. since I'm a java developer), but according to the website only the 6310i and the 7210 claim to actually work in America. They are GSM-only to boot, which means you'll have to find a GSM carrier in your area that has roaming partners where you travel. GSM is just getting a foothold in the US while in other parts of the world it's the dominant network infrastructure.

Now I know how folks that had a clost full of Laserdisc movies felt when DVD finally came out.

Mobile operators have been kicked in the head by the amazing takeoff of SMS messages. Globally, about 750 million messages get sent a day (that's no typo, check out http://www.gsmworld.com/news/press_2001/press_rele ases_28.html for the scoop. Operators have had to revamp their pricing structure a bit - for instance, they're all now negotiating a "pay me to deliver" (dunno what it's really called) structure, whereby operators charge other operators to receive SMS from their network. Currently, it's screwed up international SMSing (Vodafone won't let me use Excell anymore, for instance). But at this SCALE of messaging, it was bound to come. We just have to hope that they don't pass on the delivery cost to the consumer - I've never paid to receive an SMS, and I don't wish to start now.

Everyone always mentions population density as an excuse for coverage in the US, but it seems like a pretty poor one.

Look at Finland as an example. There is an average density of less than 17 people per square kilometer, probably the lowest in Europe. Almost everyone lives in the main cities and the density in Lapland is extremely low plus a few reindeer. But check out the coverage of the main GSM network operator. The other main operator has almost equal coverage as well.

There's no mention of the little "gotchas" such as data service fees: $5/mo + $0.15/min modem access (Cingular) or for GPRS (yes, it's out there, but not much) it's $15 for the first 500k plus $0.07 for each subsequent k (Cingular) or $20/5M + $5/M (Voicestream). And we won't even go into roaming fees. Note the vast disparity in pricing between Voicestream and Cingular.

Nor does he speculate about the poor likelihood of a timely GPRS rollout. Voicestream has it already, but you can only get it on the West Coast if you're in Washington- the Pacific-Bell (California & Nevada) side of Cingular isn't well known for its infrastructure, so who knows if it'll be available locally even by the time the Treo update is available.

So, yeah, the hardware and software are nice and the thing is nice as both a phone (though I'd probably prefer bigger dialing buttons) and PDA if you like the Palm OS (though he doesn't go into how much smaller the screen is compared to a normal Palm or Handspring Visor), but using the thing to its full wireless capability can get expensive. And considering that the GPRS support isn't yet available, the wireless capability is partially vaporware.

Palm has a nice GRPS modem out.. seems like anybody with a decent palm and the modem within a area that is accessible by GRPS would be quite happy except if they cant afford the service.. I for one wouldnt mind being in a Cafe and whipping out my Palm and looking up the current movie listings for teh area I'm in and be able to find a decent movie that I want to watch..

Voicestream has a page that has GRPS capable devices at: http://www.gsmworld.com/technology/gprs_terminals. html

M-services requires WAP. What M-services seems to really be about is setting a minimum level of functionality and a common look-and-feel for all phones.

http://www.gsmworld.com/news/press_2001/press_rele ases_24.html

Firstly, M-Services (not M-Series, as mentioned in the submission) "could include enhanced graphics, music, video, games, ring tones, screen savers and other compelling services" (from the link). Note this is nothing to do with browsing content on the Internet.

Secondly, another quote from the article: "M-Services will leverage other key standardisation efforts like WAP, EMS, MMS and SyncML to bring a consistent user experience for digital content." says Jan Wäreby, CEO, Ericsson Consumer Division

To make an (admittedly poor) analogy, whilst WAP is like Web browsing, M-Services will be like Flash animation.

And anyway, the "failure" of WAP was clearly not due to poor download speeds, inability to use phones for browsing, or problems with using new protocols in mobile phone networks, as had already been claimed in this Slashdot thread. All of these factors are present in Japan, and despite this there is the success of NTT DoCoMo's iMode service, J-Phone's J-sky, or the TU-KA EZweb with in total 37 million users (See the stats at http://www.tca.or.jp/index-e.html)

Andrew Scott

Typical Clueless US centric trash

Do you really mean to tell me that IS-136 ..with it's 8kb audio Codec ,as opposed to GSM with 13kb codec, is better?? I don't know about you but I actually do want to here what the person on the phone is telling me clearly.

a) you can run IS-136 on the US 800 MHz band and not GSM, thanks to the latter's screw-the-US design

GSM 1900 pretty much screws the US design...i guess Sprint does the same for choosing 1900..

b) they're both obsolete,

Uhmm Hold on just one second..I need to call a friend on my obsolete GSM phone ..and pass this major news update on to the other 500 million GSM users worldwide... However, for the benefit of your clueless, cnn informed, ignorance ..you should study the GSM interface structure..and if you did, you would learn that GSM is only an air interface on top of TDMA..which TDMA can be replaced with CDMA..more like W-cdma...as what UMTS is doing. Obsolete?? hmmmmmmm....

So THe UMTS group pick a frequency that is more suited to the european spectrum for Europe...not for UMTS worldwide. You are correct, they lowered the Frequency to suit the FCC needs and the military... To work within this country...and with it laws. Yeah really petty ..

At&T, VoicesTream, Microcell/Fido..has performed test with UMTS in the US and Canada..doesn't sound like they plan on leaving the US out nor do they plan to get left out. Qualcomm got left out because the wanted more influence on the technology UMTS was using ...hence wanted more use of their proprietary technology. Alas Qaulcom chose to go to their corner and use the pointless CDMA 2000...

It's ok man. How about you roam the U. S. of A...while I go roam the world ...from Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, Calcutta..New York LA..and Norman, OK....and tell you how it's working for me. My point?? When something is more Universal and hasworldwide mass appeal..And a bright future a head...The US needs to catch on to this ..otherwise yes it will get left behind... Then u tell me what is obsolete and what's not, when the world uses a universal technology and you don't...

Note, if you actually do the math ..go to GSM World ...look at the members and how many "out siders" have been joining (see Brazil), compared to the one and only Qualcomm and then you can come back and tell me whose really closed.