AT&T Could Soon Offer GSM To U.S. Customers

Tavern alerts us to this CNET story which indicates that AT&T will soon offer GSM service to U.S. customers, noting "Maybe US companies are figuring out it's time not to compete in infrastructure, but to compete in services." The article also mentions the investment of Japanese wireless giant DoCoMo into AT&T's wireless service; you may recall that they're the creators of the finger-in-ear phone mentioned a few months back. I got to demo this phone in October, and I hope they speed up the development -- it was fun to say "Hi, Mom. I'm talking with my finger in my ear!"

Comments

Re:What the hell is GSM service?

[evilandi]

SYRiNX wrote: Would someone please bother to explain what GSM service is?

GSM is Global System for Mobiles. It is a digital standard for cellular telephones which runs at between 9600bits/sec and 14.4bits/sec.

There are two particularly popular features of GSM:

• Roaming - you can use transmitters owned by companies other than the company you pay your bill to. For instance, you can go to a foreign country and your cellphone will work automatically (but you usually pay a surcharge on calls).

  I can take my Nokia 7110 mobile phone to virtually anywhere in Europe and it works. No hassle.

• SMS, WAP and ISDN - a whole raft of digital data protocols are supported as standard. These include text messaging (SMS Short Message Service), scaled-down web browsing (WAP Wireless Application Protocol) and data telephone calls (ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network).

There are, of course, some downsides. Biggest of these is that the transmitters have to be much closer together than analogue transmitters to ensure consistent coverage.

This isn't a problem in densely populated continents such as Europe or Asia. In the UK for instance, there is near 100% coverage of landmass, even in rural areas- I have strong mobile phone reception at my home in Gloucestershire, UK despite being so rural that I don't have mains sewerage! In the Americas however, with large blobs of population concentrated in small areas with vast inbetween areas of little or no population, this requirement for so many transmitters could be considered uneconomic.

To be quite honest though, us Europeans consider the USA's lack of GSM coverage as frankly a frightening concept. I can't imagine what it would be like to drive somewhere and my phone not working. To me, that is as unacceptable as my watch not working.

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Background on GSM

[wolvie_]

A lot of people posting don't know what GSM is, or why it is good. It's a mobile telephony standard like CDMA or TDMA, and has some very decent sounding voice compression. It operates on 900 and 1900 MHz, and is widely used throughout Australasia and Europe. It operates similarly to other digital cellular networks, but cells tend to be much smaller than on other standards such as CDMA, making it more suited to metropolitan use. It is true GSM crypto was cracked, but if you need security for your conversation, you shouldn't be using wireless in the first place.

There is already GSM coverage over much of the US, but it is far from complete, and presents problems to international visitors, who cannot use global roaming on their dualband GSM phones. While not exclusive to GSM networks, SMS is an extremely useful facility (nine billion SMS were sent around the world in August) that many users of non-GSM networks often miss out on (you can send SMSes to phones from many web sites for free). GSM ties in with the other popular acronyms at the moment - GPRS, WAP and Bluetooth (but not iMode - iMode is something specific to DoCoMo and their phones, while the rest of the world uses WAP).

There is more information on GSM at GSM World and the North American GSM Alliance.

Slashdot headline wrong again! NOT GSM!

[isdnip]

If anybody bothered to read the CNET article and/or research the topic, they'd understand that AT&T is no more adopting GSM than Morse code.

GSM is an obsolescent technology, a clever hack for the 1980s but terribly inefficient by today's standards. The GSM community is planning to migrate to new "3G" protocols, which are designed to accommodate GSM migration while using a CDMA-derived technology.

AT&T is planning to use EDGE (a data upgrade of their current IS-136 TDMA protocol) and migrate to new formats that will, in the 3G spirit, interwork better with GSM. And they've got the common sense to use imode rather than WAP, which is pretty awful. So in a while their sets will be data-compatible with where GSM networks will be. But that's NOT the same as adopting GSM in the latter's twilight of existence.