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3G Cel Service Starts in Japan
Graymalkn writes "According to this story on the BBC, DoCoMo has finally launched the world's first 3G cellular service in Japan. Phones start at $560 and can go as high as $800 for one which can double as a video camera." Eventually they'll be able to watch movies on the new phones, but for now service for the phones is limited to a 20 mile radius around the center of Tokyo. I haven't found an exact number of bandwidth, but I believe it's like 384k downlink. To your phone. Once again, my jealousy runs rampant.
Tentacle porn on the go!
Je t'aime Stéphanie
I want a 326k download on my phone!! Although I must admit driving and watching my cell phone won't be great for my driving record. ^_^
Although it will be a great watching the Fifth Element during my Political Science class. Hmmm... This applys to government... By having government in it. ^_^
The Tweak Files: Sanity is for t
and the thing overheats in 15 min. Sounds pretty experimental to me...
sulli
RTFJ.
Why doesn't this kind of technology show up at my local cell phone retailer?
NTT DoCoMo is also cautious, expecting only one in every 10 subscribers to have a 3G phone in three years' time.
Wow, that statement really illustrates how Japanese think in the long term.
I hope, for their sake, that they can run legacy networks over the new backbone.
Boy it would be great to have 300k/sec transmitted directly through your brain.
You wouldn't even have to look at the phone screen to watch movies. They'd play directly on your retinas!
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
*SURE* I want to spend $800 on a phone that does 384kbit/s video...
ALL I have to do is- give up any sense of privacy in my whereabouts to Government (big brother) Agencies....
As cool as it sounds, as much as I've wanted to have video phone, I think I will have to PASS.
No thanks.
In Europe, providers say they will have to quintuple (x5) the density of antennas to support 3G... local community planners are very unhappy!
By the way, the phone's price will be less - networks subsidise the handset manufacturer's prices, based on the idea that you will spend craploads of cash when you actually use the phone.
Japan rocks! I lived there for two years and the tech roll out and innovation is second to none.
if electricity is created by electrons, is morality created by morons?
No need to be jealous...
Take a piece of large paper. Cut a hole in it 1.5" by 2.25". Cover your monitor with this piece of paper. Now start using your computer like this and you will experience things just as if you had this service on a cell phone in your neck 'o the woods.
OK, except for videoconferencing. But still, I think it's un petit peu de overkill here! Now laptops plugged into said cellphones...mmmm, that I could get used to =)
A while back I read somewhere (Slashdot I think) that the military was not releasing the frequencies that were originally allocated for 3G phones... Does this mean the Japanese will have 3G all to themselves while we suffer from 2.5G for the next 10 years??? Anyone out there know??? Is GPRS still gonna happen??
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Understand that 384k is the bottom of the barrel, the 3G standard allows bandwidth usage of several megabits. After the demise of Metricom, this is what this country needs!!! Maybe it's time to start learning Japanese! ;-)
Maybe it's not 3G, but it will surely be much more cool than all the other phones we can have now!
http://www.nokia.ca/english/products/9290.asp
i hope so. the thing i am wondering about is, how quickly are providers going to implement the service around the world. my bet is, everyone is going to take their time, to wait and see.
understandable, when you think of the kind of money involved here.
so the question remains. are people going to make the investment or not.
as good and cool is this sounds, right now i wouldn't!
what's your take on that?
Tom
Thomas Schmid athschmid@gmail.com Skype: athschmid
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Do these new services work with the same towers that provide NTT service to existing customers? Is this overlayed? How does this work?
________________
All my sig are fjdklafjkldafjkldafdaklf
From http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/reuters_wir e/1530436l.htm
The standard model costs about 48,000 yen ($400) while the fancier video model costs about 68,000 yen ($570). The data model can be had for about 28,000 yen ($235).
+++ath0
GPRS phones are now on sale in the UK (and if we've got 'em, American's must have had them for ages!). However, it's currently still over a circuit-switched link - that is, the phone establishes a channel to the server, just like for a voice call or WAP, and then sends data down it, using PPP or summat similar. However, you still only get charged per kb (well, "only" - 1kb is very small, plus the minimum packet length is about 170 chars I think, so it'll cost a bomb - not for me yet). At least that's on this side of the Atlantic. Any Americans care to enlighten us?
Why on god's earth do I want to watch a movie on my cellphone? Convergence, as with all things, is best in moderation. The irony of this is that we'll have people watching movies on cellphones and talking on cellphones in movies. Then after the movie is over they'll get in their car and watch TV and talk on their phone WHILE they are driving.
Theory: it was recently demonstrated that multi-tasking causes the human brain to be less efficicent. An increasing tendancy to do more than one thing at a time will lead to an overall reduction in the productivity of humanity. Because the time we spend will be less productive we will have to spend more time partially working in order for us to achieve the same output. This will lead to more multi-tasking. Wash, Rinse, Repeat...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
However, once the spectrum disputes are over and the major players are back to their money-grubbing game, i'm guessing 144 kbps - 320 kbps would be the entry level bandwidth here in the states, mostly because it would require the least amount of transitional work in the packet switching department...
Meanwhile much of the rest of the world struggles to get clean water and electricity. Just a reminder that you need to keep your geek-goodies envy in perspective.
--hongpong.com
I'm curious how much it will cost per month. Flat rate, or will they charge per bit? Hmmm... streaming a movie on a laptop via my cel during a long commute or something would be nice, but I don't think 600 or 700 megs @ 384k/s comes cheap.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
2 megabits to my phone means 2 megabits to my laptop too! I can stand still for that.
Guvegrra?
Do NOT question the trendmeister forcasts! You will be taken away and reprogrammed!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Well now, good for the Japanese, another wicked cool new wireless implementation for a country that is already lightyears ahead of the rest of the world. I wonder how long before the Europeans get 3G, though - I heard it's been a bit of a boondoggle over there.
But what I really want to know why the US is so far behind when it comes to the wireless world. While I don't labor under any sort of naive notion that the US has to be first in *everything* worldwide, this has perplexed me for some time. I don't think it's the technology, is it? Here are some ideas of mine, but I don't know how well grounded they are:
1.) Settlement in the US is much less dense than Japan or Europe, so there are greater infrastructual expenses involved with new wireless standards
2.) The NIMBY crowd in the US is more vocal than elsewhere and holds up new infrastructure installations
3.) Standards are more tightly controlled in Europe/Japan, meaning instead of three cellphone antennas for three different carriers on top of apartment buildings, perhaps there is one shared by all?
4.) For cultural reasons Americans are not as interested in games, instant messages, internet, and video as Europeans & the Japanese
-Adam in Philly
(who still uses a single band PCS phone made in, like, 1997 or something)
until then i'm pretty glad we got GPRS and "2.5G" here (sweden). a 115kbps link is a-ok with me.
here's another...
smaller markets require less capital overhead to roll out brand new technology. Larger markets require correspondingly larger capital investment, therefore usually take a incremental approach.
I know this was one of the proposals when the 3G specs were first being drawn up -- have a single standard that TRULY is worldwide.
For instance, when I'm travelling in Japan, I need a PDC phone that is proprietary to Japan, when I'm in the states, I need a Sprint CDMA phone (GSM in the states sucks), when I'm travelling in the rest of the world, I need a GSM 900/1800 phone, etc...
Is this still the plan, or do we still have to deal with a hodgepodge of incompatible standards?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Yeah, imagine how cool you'll look holding your cellular phone in front of your face so the other party can see you. As for that 300k+ connection, what good is it if the phone doesn't come with a 20GB hard drive and a copy of Morpheus? The masses will never accept this.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
First of all, could we have this submission translated into English for those of us who don't breathlessly read news sites for information about telephones? "DoMoCo" must be a company, but what's "3G"? Third generation?
Second, video cellphones? Doubles as a camera? So how does that work? I pull the phone away from my ear and hold it up to my face so I can see a 1 in^2 image of my friend (and he can see me) then quickly jam it back to my ear so we can talk? Until the device overheats or the battery goes dead?
Video phones over *regular* lines exist today but nobody is buying them. Why would I want a video cellphone?
324006
Here are the specs from the DoCoMo web site. 64 Kbps for real-time video, max 384K bps downlink, 64K bps uplink. Decent (but not great) battery life, too.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
That's why they have those sensor gates at the doors of every record and video store. They read the strips in the greenbacks so the MPAA/RIAA can read exactly how much cash you have in your wallet!
That's Mr. crazy goatfucker, to you, mate!
"The battery heats up after about 15 minutes of conversation and runs out fairly quickly, in about an hour, compared to second generation phones which can last for hours, or even a whole day."
Here's my prediction ("All the authority and accuracy of Gartner (i.e. None) without the cost" (TM)):
/. as of late. The infrastructure cost for some 801.xx network is *much* less than 3G service. Its a fairly open protocol, so you won't get locked into Sprint / AT&T / WorldCom / et al's service.
3G is going to be dead in the water, at least for the next few years (5-10) here in the states. Why?
Because what it delivers can be done for MUCH less money. High speed wireless *is* a very cool thing, and very desirable. The problem is the cellular phone isn't the application for it. In reality, who wants to watch a movie on a small screen if you have to pay for it? Who wants to pipe music down the phone if you have to pay for it? These services are not going to be cheap (someone's got to pay for all of those licenses). What reason does a cellular *need* 300+kbps?
The only reason you would want that speed to your phone is if you have it hooked up to a PDA or a laptop. That's the only "killer app" I see for high speed internet. And if that's the case, there are better and cheaper ways of doing it. Think the "Freenets" that have been talked about on
I see cellular service sticking with 2.5 G here in the states. That allows you to do all the things that are a cellphone actually does well (voice, some limited data: e-mail, texting, *simple* WAP). For high speed data that you'd need for your laptop/PDA, look for the commercialization of 801.xx (or something similar).
So says the Bastard
Right. Like the government gives a shit where you are/were. Or that they would have any trouble finding out if they DID care.
If you add GPS (as in the E911 service in the other article today), you not only location-based advertising, but location-based information.
"you're currently at bus stop #445... there will be a bus there in 2.3 minutes, time enough for you to get a coffee at Starbucks, 27m around the corner. There is a lineup of 2 people currently, and average serving time is 43 seconds."
It's not THAT far fetched... and although advertising pays for many of these services, it's not necessarily a bad thing in all cases (if handled right, and opt-in).
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I was looking at getting a world phone (GSM 900/1800/1900), but I can't seem to find one that also has AMPS (analog) built in. Does GSM even co-exist with AMPS? I'm not talking about those ancient Nokia's with the optional AMPS module. Does anyone know if there's a modern GSM phone with a built-in AMPS options?
TIA!
As in NEVER. Ever.
Why? - well damn if they can send a man to the moon then those there geekers in NAZER should be able to get me mah TV phone lika Dick Tracy.
There is simply too much money to be made with the crappy service you already get and no incentive to cooperate in billing or roaming systems. I mean who do you think actually bought the congressmen and the FCC leverage? The phone companies.
Look at it another way. The spectrum auction drove the prices so high that phone companies no longer have the billions of dollars it would take to actually deliver the service. And you know what? That was the plan. Keep it on the shelf and off the market from anyone else so they could suck dollars for 1G 2G service now.
In Finland the maximum bandwidth of GPRS networks will be something like 20 - 30 kilobits per second during the next few years. This is due to the lack of advanced coding schemas (the starndards are here for up to 155kbps but no-one has implementations) and not allocating all 8 timeslots of the communication channel for GPRS (this will, however, not be the case in other countries shere GSM is not used as much as here).
However, if they really have the WCDMA working it's something very cool. And bloody expensive.
Source: GPRS for Application developers course at Ericsson last summer.
-Panu
I think is was Sanyo that have created a chip that can hardware encode and decode MPEG-4 video/audio in realtime, the chip is planned to be built into thier cooming 3G phones and sold to other phone makers so you can have wireless video conferencing with superb picture quality aswell as watch streaming movies and television. How about being able to stream your DivX movies (DivX is a MPEG-4 implementation) from home to your phone and being able to forward programs from your Tivo/ReplayTV to your phone anywere and anytime. *drool* The future looks cool..
In my hometown there is a rail line that hasn't been used since the 50's or so. Recently, some construction workers showed up and started fixing the tracks so that they could be used again. There was an emergency town meeting and they quickly voted to not allow the railroad to run again. When they delivered the news to the railroad company they were basically told to fuck off because the rail line was under federal juristiction and they had no say in the matter. It was a great outcome, because probably only 2% of the town cared either way but the ones that cared had gotten themselves elected.
This whole cell tower situation reminded me of this little story, because it's the small portion of the community that cares wether there are cell towers around that actually expend the effort to get elected to some crappy local government position. Most of the time they run uncontested, or against someone with the same obnoxious opinions that are so unpopular that they only way that they can get what they want is by running for local office and winning. They are usually opposed to any change to their town because it wouldn't be that same as where they grew up anymore so they stand in the way of all proposals wether they are good or bad. Maybe if we had direct representation on the local level for issues like this things would be better (I know in my area that there are more people that want the new cell services then people who don't want the antennas), but if people don't care enough about these issues to speak up or go to town meetings, then they probably wouldn't go to vote either... Then again maybe town governments elsewhere aren't as screwed up as where I live.
Between the houses on Main street not getting painted because they can't figure out which color is 'historically appropriate', and the crappy cell coverage I'm starting to get a little pissed off. At this rate we'll either be stuck in whatever time period they deem historically apropriate and not make any progress, or the town will slowly decay due to process delays.
..they already have a 3G PCMCIA card available.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
...are over 10 million people.
That kind of population density allows the rollout of things like PCS, i-mode, 3G, etc.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I won't care one bit about 3G until I can actually get a call through in a real-world setting. It's very common that I have to redial the number 5-10 times in downtown San Francisco during peak hours just to get through the network congestion. For providers who have oversold their service, everyone competes for a channel in their overloaded cell. And now they want to increase the bandwidth? How about taking the 256Kbps or 2Mbps or whatever the hell the limit is and use it to support more channels?
ObProvider: Cingular Wireless
http://www.djw.org/information/palm8290.html
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
LETS BOMB JAPAN ALONG WITH AFGHANISTAN... hell in 48 hours we're attacking afghanistan, betcha didn't know that. I want fucking streaming video of .. well, you know..
combine 3g cell with body battery generator.. HUMAN CYBORG!@$@$ RUN!
That's why we all still should be using DOS!
or....
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
My brother and dad made a Spud-Gun once (you know, big pipe that you stuff some lighter fluid and a potato in and add a spark) and my wife began teasing them about "all the poor hungry kids in Africa". My dad looked at her, grabbed a bag of potatos and said "then send 'em a bag of potatos!"
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Actually, some countries countries that are way ahead of us like Finland, have a REALLY low density. We're talking 17 people per sq/km.
So why does Finland and other low density countries have such a high density of cellphones (>65 cellphones per 100 inhabitants)?
Standards, Standards, Standards! Can you imagine if NetBIOS, IPX, and TCP/IP were all competing for WAN protocol usage on the Internet? The internet would be mostly useless. Buying different routers and adapters for compatibility, and still not be able to have an AIM go through each type - imagine!
Most countries in the world (exceptions being North America, Japan [PDC], South Korea [CDMA]), standardized on GSM for digital cellular.. and this was already back in 1992. Hence, there is probably 150 million GSM customers already, who can all roam between networks. The FCC eventually allowed GSM in, much against Motorola's liking, but on the 1900MHz band, thus making interopability a pain in the ass.
Take America for instance, while AMPS (analog) is dying for the most part as a protocol, you've still got CDMA (Alltel, Verizon), TDMA (AT&T - who is moving to GSM 1900 whenever the economy fixes up), iDen (Nextel), GSM 1900 (Cingular). That means, to cover all these phones, you need *5* base stations. Not only that, other than AMPS compatibility, phones do not generally allow for compatibility between them. So, you've got 5 types of phones manufacturers of all this equipment has to make up for.
GSM isn't the best, but it means real roaming with real coverage! I can take my Motorola Tri-Band GSM phone, and roam between Cingular in the US, Telia in Sweden, and whoever in Uganda. I can send SMS's between any GSM customer around the world. Try having a Verizon customer send a GSM to a Cingular customer.
3G is the 'final solution' to this incompatibility mess I'm told. We'll see
IANACE (I am not a cellular engineer, just some one fed up with cell phones.. flame away at my ignorance!)
But wasn't 3G spectrum allocated to military in wake of WTC being chopped down? Hence I assume 3G will not be implemented in US anytime soon... or EVER.
You soulless moderators have no sense of humor. I am appalled!
How many cell phone towers would you need for a country the size of germany or france? Now how many will you need for the US? Its the amount of infrastructure thats required to support all this.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
You and Heather are just so cute together, Eric! All blessings for your marriage!
What is a "cel" site?
There will still be a number of different standards (Why have one standard when you have two :) but they will be less incompatible than before.
:) I've worked on UMTS (the European 3G system) since the evaluation stages of different multiple access techniques. In the beginning there was a lot of hype about the high speeds that could be achieved, and yes, if you are alone in a cell of your own...its true, however 3G offers much more than just higher speeds, the most important being an increase in capacity for voice calls, reduction in transmission power and the implementation of location-based services.
Btw, if anyone thinks they will have 384 kbits/s all to themselves...send me a postcard from Utopia
We have a working landline phone/data network. Japan and Europe do not. Consumer demand for high-spec wireless kit has scaled appropriately in both areas.
(And yes, before I get piled on: I am well aware that you can get dial tone in Europe and Japan. You just can't get it quickly.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
The service, named "freedom of mobile multi-media access", or Foma, will initially be limited to a 30-kilometre (20-mile) radius around the centre of Tokyo.
Wonder if the creators of the acronym read too much Kurt Vonnegut in high school.
You keep bitching about not having any bandwidth. Get VA to terminate a T1 at your house, with the other end terminated on the inside of the firewall at the /. server cage. You have 1.5Mb bandwidth, you can admin /. without fear, and you and VA can write it off as a business expense.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Oh no! The Government found out that I only leave the house to go to work and to buy CDRs and Mountain Dew! I don't know how they could use this info against me or anyone else, but they'll find a way! After all, they are out to get me.
is it just nitpicking, or is it true that DivX is not MPEG-4, but rather came out of a prerelease candidate? So, I suppose it is similar, but then how much different is MPEG-4 anyway?
...when you "lose" it in the toilets with auto-answer activated.
just bitching and moaning to make yourself feel better about yourself (walk the walk, my friend)
supporting or proposing that money be taken from anyone against their will to fund these operations
But I am sure you are being rational... after all, no one here on /. ever lets their emotions cloud logic and reason.
They have cell towers that are made up to look like trees. They're typically much less attractive than artificial Christmas trees, which I don't like to begin with.
Those Damned things are uglier and catch my eyes more than regular radio towers.
I know its off topic but these things are so ugly, its got to stop. No more fake antennas. If you want to disguise cell phone antennas, the best way is just to mount them on top of buildings. If buildings are not available - capitalize on topographical features. If the area is completely flat without any buildings, build a cell phone tower to make it more interesting.
...before geeks start migrating to Japan in large droves? Between the neat gadgets and the whole anime thing, plus the wacky DMCA-type stuff going on here, it can't be long now...the US better watch out if they want to have a tech economy five years from now. ;)
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
Once again, my jealousy runs rampant.
I think you mean envy.
"Please note that it is now illegal in San Francisco to watch BULLITT and drive at the same time."
"Thank you, Goodnight Slashdot, don't forget to tip your servers!"
A couple of things about connectivity in Japan:
0 9&mode=thread talks about it but makes some mistakes. Cost for 100Mbps is like 10,900 yen/month ($90 or so) and doesn't include ISP charge (for me AT&T is an aditional 7,000 yen). The cheaper service offers 10Mbps for a cost of about $100 total (ISP chrage plus NTT charge). These are both fiber to the home "broadband" connections. If you don't need the upload/download bandwidth, you can go with Yahoo who's offering a service which provides 8Mbps down/900Kbps up for about $20-25/month flat fee (line charge/isp everything included).
Many people are saying that the G3 thing is wasted on mobiles. I'd have to say that's not the case. As some have pointed out there are pcmcia cards with the same technology in them. I've had one of these G3 devices since about May or June (NTT sent one to my company to trial). When the service works (has been getting better weekly, but still had coverage problems and dropouts as of three weeks ago which was last time I used it) I get the full speed on downloads 384K, but haven't tested the 64K uplink speed. The dropouts problem I've seen consists of having 3 full bars of connectivity (the max # of bars indicated) then dropping for no apparent reason, even when you're stationary. Because of this I haven't allowed the person I'm testing for to go to clients with this technology.
On a different note, NTT came by my house yesterday to prepare to install my 100Mbps dedicated connection. The thread here http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/24/15102
Japan is pushing all areas of connectivity from wireless to home service. The problem now will be as many have said the backbones... AT&T has the single fastest backbone to the US at 410Mbps with a number of others, but are offering 100Mbps connectivity to home users... Ahh, something's not right there. Add on Yahoo's offering of free installation to "the first million customers", and NTT's expecting only 10% of their customer base (more than 37 Million subscribers as of August)to have G3 technology...
That's a LOT of users having acces to some very impressive nominal bandwidth. I wonder how they're going to go about delivering on it all.
>Also the american telcos didn't manage to attract
>younger people with customized offerings (here
>74% of the 12-19 years olds have cell phones.
>They produce a large share of the telcos's
>revenue.).
Heh... you can blame the war on (some) drugs for that one.
Well, things MAY have changed since I graduated high school, but given the pigheaded stubbornness and vindictiveness of administrative and law enforcement types, I doubt it.
Anyway, when I was in high school, the "powers that be" had decreed that only drug dealers and users carried either pagers or cell phones. Thus, in the name of the holy crusade against (some) drugs, any student caught with either was subject to a five-day (minimum) suspension.
Kinda slows down adoption in that demographic when the petty tyrants that lord over them ban the technology from a good half of their waking hours.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
You need 5 base stations because you have 5 carriers. This has nothing to do with different standards, each carrier would need their own towers even if they all were GSM.
Also, the fact that 900/1800MHz GSM is not available in the US has to do with spectrum allocation. I believe that these bands are used for something else here, unlike the 1900Mhz band that was eventually allocated for cellular phones.
So my girlfriend's sister says that DoCoMo have something big planned, we laugh at her because we had the -then- new N503i. Two weeks later the N503iS is realeased. Now this!! Damn them - damn them all to hell!!
Cacophanus - excuse me while I weep...
Cacophanus
http://cacophanus.net/
that 384kbps is phone to phone, non-usable to java appli and you don't get an IP address.
In otherwords, it's not mobile IP
what you do get is full motion video between phones, e-mail *and* and micro-browser through which you can access the internet via and mostly transparent gateway. Plan on spending about $30 a month over your regular phone bill for even the lightest browsing and e-mail. If you opt-in for the video conferecning, you're looking at almost an extra $100 per month on the most liberal plan and about $50 a month for the use-it-once-in-a-blue-moon plan.
...so, as you can see, 3G watered down internet access is going to cost you serious bucks. Thing to remember about Japan is that the carriers didn't pay one red cent for spectrum and they had a 10 year old, high-speed wireless data network (called PHS) to springboard off of. 3G ain't going to happen in Europe and the States the way the telcos *think* it's going to happen.
My general opinion of cellular carrier mediated internet access is that is blows large hearty chunks, no matter if it's WAP/Imode/CDPD/M-services/etc. I think I'll be scamming my bandwidth with netstumbler before I pay the man:
http://www.netstumbler.com
A company called Landala is rolling out a test network for 4G in Gothenburg, Sweden later this year. It's only going to cover about a square kilometer at first and the speed will be about 30 times faster than the 3G network. You can use a regular cell phone to make calls with, but to use the more advanced services you will need a phone kinda like the ones in use in the 3G network in Japan now.
3 83 6,00.html (article is in Swedish)
That sure beats the speed of my net connection, hehe.
http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/it/story/0,2789,9
Most other countries use different hardware as well. You cannot buy a cell phone in Europe/Asia, and bring it to the US. The cool thing about these phones is that all activation is done by a small simcard that you insert in your phone. You can have many of these (many different numbers) and they are cheap. Here in Hong Kong I can get a phone and a simcard set up in 30minutes for $50USD (about 200 minutes). US needs to use this same simcard technology.
If anyone has read the latest Red Herring, then they already know what I am about to say. In the US, 3G is where the DOD operates, meaning, nobody else can play there. All of the wireless companies overpaid by a tremendous amount the last time they could buy the airways, and aren't going to bay the billions of dollars that it will take to locate the DOD to another freq. range. Any with the state of the US right now, is congress really going to try and piss off the military? I think not...
It's my personal opinion that 3G is only going to be really useful in Japan and the technofetishist desire for it's use here is just silly. I mean look at it, what the fuck are you going to use a 384k download for on a fucking cell phone? We don't have anything remotely like i-mode here in the states, you might respond with wireless internet but i-mode is NOT the internet. The closest thing you can compare i-mode to is AOL in 1995. You paid for AOL access and got exactly that, access to AOL's internal network. Everything was hosted and maintained by AOL. I-mode though lets individual companies put up i-mode pages and allows for a pay per byte akin to charging by the minute on a 900 number. This is very different than in the US where we're trying to adapt either our phones or the internet for use on the phones. From the onset i-mode was designed for the phones and likewise the phones designed for i-mode. It is feasible in Japan to have high bandwidth connections on mobile devices because they are being charged by the byte (or packet I suppose) so they aren't going to hook up a phone to their laptop and download the latest Linux ISO. That is almost exactly what most people want to do with 3G networks assuming they proliferate in the US due to some miracle involving bandwidth and the military. Any time 3G networks are mentioned here everyone goes into "DSL replacement" mode where they look for yet another avenue of broadband. If DoCoMo somehow offered i-mode here but charged by the byte or packet nobody would use it because we've gotten too used to the internet essentially being free.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
GSM in the states only sucks if you live in the States. I have a dual band GSM 900/1900 phone (the Nokia 8890) and live in Europe. I have excellent access whenever I visit the US (which is often) as I usually remain in metro areas.
Even things like retrieving voicemail and full SMS back home is fully supported.
As far as I am concerned, global roaming is here now. What is really missing though, is a) cheap roaming (the roaming charges are ridiculously expensive the world over), and b) cheap data access. My provider charges me for data access outside my 100 free minute plan, and data access while roaming, that's just out of the question, financially, not technically. 2.5G or 3G hopefully may solve that...
You don't get a dedicated line for that price, you only get a shared line. In the case of the cheapest one, 10Mbps for $100, which is for buildings, you can share with at most 100+ other people. WOW! Imagine you living in an area of /.ers; you'd get 100Kbps for $100. Is that cheap?? You also have the minimum of 10 users in the building in this case.
l
Here is the pricing information from NTT(japanese, no provider):
http://www.ntt-east.co.jp/flets/opt/s_outline.htm
and a provider:
http://home.hi-ho.ne.jp/home/bflets/ryokin.html
In sum:
100M: 27900 once, 17900/month
10M: 27900 once, 9900/month
bldg: 12700 once, 6300/month
plus cables and some extras.
the word 'paranoid' comes to mind for some reason..
I guess this is just a personal thing, but i'd rather have a tracking device on me.
I have nothing to hide, and if anything happened to me, they would be able to find me quicker.