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Voicestream Quietly Releases GPRS In The U.S.
hidden72 writes: "Voicestream quietly rolled out their iStream GPRS wireless data service in the United States last week. More information is available from Voicestream's website. General information about GPRS can be found here. Theoretically, GPRS data rates can reach close to 170k. Voicestream's per-packet charges are quite expensive, ($40 for 10MB) but it's an always-on 28k-56k data connection available in most metropolitan areas."
All I can say is "Thank Standards" its about time that you can use the same phone in the rest of the world and still have it work in the States without having to buy a bulky tri-band number. Now if the billing issues could be sorted out then it would be great.
Why is the US always at least 2 years behind the rest of the planet for Wireless ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
You quote $40 for 10MB, in the UK the prices are about £7($5) for 1MB if included in the price plan, or 2p/KB ($15/MB) if not, so it seems to be in line.
The problem with GPRS is that the suppliers are likely to kill the market by charging too much and restricting the accessable sevices to a few WAP sites which the supplier has a relationship with (I'm told at least one telco in the UK does this, but I havn't checked it out).
SMS used to be a service that was hardly ever used due to expensive prices and a restriction to the suppliers network, alot of people didn't even know their phones could do it. As soon as the prices dropped and the telcos opened gateways to each other, the volumes exploded, now SMS' are a large part of the telcos' income.
GPRS is something that will be kept in the WAP bracket of niche user base until telcos finally realise that people will use it if they can afford it. Ironically GPRS will solve the main problem with WAP, speed.
Palm has a nice GRPS modem out.. seems like anybody with a decent palm and the modem within a area that is accessible by GRPS would be quite happy except if they cant afford the service.. I for one wouldnt mind being in a Cafe and whipping out my Palm and looking up the current movie listings for teh area I'm in and be able to find a decent movie that I want to watch..
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Voicestream has a page that has GRPS capable devices at: http://www.gsmworld.com/technology/gprs_terminals
Here in germany its 190 DM (about 90 us$) for 10 MB .. :(
:)
:)
And they wonder why noone is using this
in fact the only application for gprs would be to check your email with a handheld computer.
Surfing the web is way too expensive with it
The reason mobile phones are doing so well in europe is the price and the flexibility. Sweden are for instance way ahead of the states, way better standard (GSM all the way), better deals and SIM cards instead of locking the consumers in.
So what does this got to do with GPRS? Well, charging per packets will be expensive, even more so as you will pay for everything in and out (I guess). WAP push will not be fun for example. And it could very very easily become extremly expensive for the cosumer, and hard to check up on how expensive it has become before it is too late. Charge me a monthly sum according to the QoS I get and I would think about it, like it is now I can not recommend anyone to use it, unless they are very rich.
You can use it with a palm... or something else with a irda connection... :-) so I guess there are some uses for it...
A friend of got gprs and uses it to talk on icq in the train, bus, etc
He also uses it to read slashdot
99Fims (about 15$) a month for unlimited GPRS data-access :)
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Yes, around here in Portugal it's still very expensive, but for those of us that were using regular modem thru gsm we get the benefit of not having to lose 45s just for the modem sync, and about 1.5 mins to login...
Right now it's cheaper doing certain things in gprs.
I'm intrigued to know what 'killer apps' are going to emerge for wireless devices. I know that the role out of WAP here in the UK has been something of a failure as no one could really see the 'benefit' of wireless web surfing which is slower as not as usable as doing it from your home PC.
The truly useful applications will use the GPS location of your phone to give you location dependent services. What's the traffic like 1 mile up the road? Where's the nearest pub that serves Wadworth's 6X? Where's the nearest record store?
Perhaps the Yellow Pages is the killer app.
------------ jay*arr*tee
I infact found my Motorola Timeport GPRS easier to setup under linux than ce or windows! The motorola software (for windows) does not work on com2 Active Sync does not like com2 either, and when it is working on com1 it does not seem to configure the modem correctly 50% of the time. Ce was just a pain requiring it to be configured on 2 different place, dial and modem, each screen you have to go though 3 pages of "advanced settings"
My chap script for linux however took me about 30 seconds to get working.
'' 'ATZ'
'' 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","ADF.BTCELLNET.NET"'
'OK' 'ATDT*99#'
'TIMEOUT' '30'
'~--' ''
James
Also known as "ISDN" on some phones.
With it, the connection time is practically zero as th GSM connects to the Internet Dialin port via ISDN instead of with a modem. To use it, you just need a different init string, and the other side has to support V110 (not all do, but a lot do).
I use it when connecting my laptop. I only get 9.6 kBit as I don't use it enough for the $10 extra a month to be able to use HSCSD (High speed circuit switched data) which is capable of transferring 14.4*3=43,2 down/14.4 up or something like that. And that only costs regular phone charges.
GPRS is too expensive here in Germany.
If I would use it, I would have to pay $0.35 per 10 kilobytes for the first 100kb and $0.10 after that.
So one MB would cost $3.50 + 90*$0.10 = $12.50 for one megabyte!!!
With HSCSD I only pay $0.10 per minute and get a decent connection. That makes a megabyte price if continously transferring data of $0.35
They're going to use GSM800 aren't they?
Just now phones are starting to have GSM 900/1800/1900 as a standard and now we have GSM 800 as well.
Oh well.
I wanted more accurate numbers but when I tried to price the damn phone + plan + contract on Voicestream's website I realized that their little shopping cart prog refuses to give you a running total... I got to the point where I would have had to enter a credit card and agree to terms and they still never let me know what exactly this was costing me. That really sucks. Okay rough guesses:
Motorola phone (that you probably didn't want) 169.99
PDA data plan (that you don't want because you have a Palm or linux on PDA) 19.99
Voice plan (that you don't want because you like the cell you have) 19.99
Compaq ipaq H3635 (because if you have to run WinCE... ) 499.99
Extra battery, mobile charger. (guess) 89.99
Comes out to: $799.95
So for almost a grand I can pretty much have my porno spam beamed straight to the metra train on the way to work... yeah I guess I could also pull down Slashdot as well so that I could keep current about glove input devices as well. True...
I think I am just gonna keep my ugly clumsy Palm VII
But the phone does come with a built in FM tuner. So maybe I am just being a bitch about the whole thing.
Hi everybody!
I just have to say one thing:
Here in Europe GPRS is already in use in cellular networks so I have some experience with it (the experience comes also from my job, I work at the largest cellular network provider here in Austria). Unlike HSCSD, GPRS does not provide stable data tranfer rates. 170 k sounds cool, but as experience has shown, these rates only apply if you stand directly next to a receiver. HSCSD uses multiple channels, reaches about 43 k and if you loose a channel (e.g. when the network gets crowded) you pay for one channel less. GPRS uses slots in one channel, and if a slot is unavailable - well, bad luck. Here in Austria most people prefer HSCSD for it is cheaper and more reliable, the maximum transmission speed reached with GRPS in real use is only slightly higher than HSCSD and generally speaking -> HSCSD is most times faster. GRPS is not a solution for high speed date. It is only a small step towards UMTS.
bye
johannes
".Sig Stealer" was here
As you can see here GSM is not a viable solution for most of America. GSM requires almost 3.5 times more towers to operate. For a country so spread out as North America is (compare the total population of Canada and American against Europe and you'll see what I mean) you won't be putting up a tower for one or two people out in the country.
If America needs national coverage (and I think they do) CDMA is the obvious choice.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Enough of these ignorant comments.
GSM is, and still isn't right for the United States for 2 reasons.
1) The European GSM standard uses 900MHz and 1800MHz. Those frequencies are used by the United States government, and have been long before GSM came around. So that's why GSM in the U.S. uses different frequencies. So any GSM phone that is, say 2 years old, won't work in Europe and vice versa.
2) Optimal cell size is a function of population density. Digital technologies, especially GSM, require smaller cell sizes. Simply put, places like Wyoming are not going to be getting digital anytime soon. But they do have analog because you can make those cells huge. GSM does not interoperate well with AMPS. CDMA IS-95 does. You can run a CDMA network and an AMPS network at 800MHz.
I also believe that CDMA is the future (not IS-95). Sure, UMTS is based on time-division, but the Docomo 3G call stack is CDMA-based.
So go buy your VoiceStream phone if you live in a big city. I live in Chicago. VoiceStream is there, but no way will I get a VoiceStream phone because if I ever go to Wisconsin, my phone will not get service. My Verizon CDMA phone gets service anywhere in the country.
Yes they are. And they're testing GPRS in Washington state. Here's the coverage map.
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
Gotta love my nokia 8290 w/ voicestream. IR modem to laptop or handheld. doubley wireless ;-)
I can dial right into my ISP and voicestream it
doesn't cost anything when it's in my minutes.
http://www.djw.org/information/palm8290.html
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
On the surface, Voicestream's plan doesn't sound bad. In Japan, you pay 0.1 yen per 128 byte packet, or about $75 per 10mb. $40 for 10mb is only half that, at about 0.05 cents per packet. Cost-wise, it's fine - but you have to buy your packets ahead of time, and you have to buy your voice minutes separately! In Japan, you buy your (subsidized to be cheap) phone, pay a flat $3/mo fee for the activation and use, and then just pay as you go by packets you send or request, be it for voice or data. As a result, text messaging in Japan (and europe) has become hugely popular and people use their phones for practically everything.
When are the American companies going to learn that what is holding the cellular market back is not so much the technology as the bass-ackwards system of purchasing a calling plan for a whole year with a certain number a minutes a month and a preposterous number of restrictions while still having to pay for incoming calls. It's overly complex, intimidating, and autocratic. These idiotic games are precisely the reason I do not yet own a mobile phone. I don't mind paying more for the phone, but I won't pay for more minutes/data than I use, and I hate playing guessing games.
It irritates me to see US technology so far behind Europe and Japan for such a stupid, greedy reason. As far as I'm concerned, a mobile phone should work anywhere in the world that a network exists, and have consistent, per-use billing regardless of where you are. Until we have something approaching that in America, I'm not buying. Here's hoping Sprint or ATT figure it out.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
quietly ????
/???
and on slashdot
what are u talking about ??
Ummm So there are around 280million or so in North America... a similar number for Europe, add in Africa, the Middle East, Asia which are all predominantly GSM and soon the argument falls into tatters. There is no reason not to use GSM, if its the network of choice in the rest of the planet, and it works over large parts of Russia (hint you don't need many towers in Nebraska or Sibera because animals don't use mobiles). And look at Finland. You'd be hard pushed to find a more sparesely populated country, and yet mobiles rule.
The infrastructure in the US sucks, its disjointed, fractured and a pain. A classic example of where a lack of goverment direction restricts choice. Having such a disjointed network has put a heavy dampner on the development of wireless in the US.
Roll on standards, even if they are goverment decreed.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The problem with WAP is incompatibility/bugginess, low usability and lack of useful content - speed is barely faster using GPRS, which simply makes it more convenient by being always-on. Every time I try a new WAP site, it doesn't work on my phone (a Nokia 7110, supposedly a standard one), due to WAP gateway, WAP browser or site problems. I would actually use WAP a bit if it worked, despite the usability - some of the content is becoming useful, e.g. a site that tells you driving directions from any point in the UK.
Yes, this is known as SIM locking in the UK, and does happen. Some operators sell you SIM locked phones and charge a fee for unlocking, others do not. In practice, many people dump the phone and service after a year and get a new one - this is often cheaper than getting an upgrade phone. However, for people who do stay with one operator, it is generally possible to transfer the SIM - it's just a matter of checking you are not SIM locked, or paying the fee if you are.
The main appeal for GPRS is not the high data rates. In practice, the data rates are similar to single-slot CSD, or sometimes as good as multi-slot HSCSD. It depends on how the operators provision their RF channels. The big deal about GPRS is that it is packet switched, "always on", and has no long call setup times.
These features make casual web/wap browsing more appealing than the old way (dial up, wait, connect, read web page, pay while reading, hang up).
There are two main uses for cellular data connections: (1) apps in the phone, like email and wap (2) use as a modem, connected to a laptop. GPRS will make #1 a lot better. The effect it will have on #2 will be that you pay for bits and not time (which is good for activities like web browsing, which have download-and-read usage patterns).
It's a shame that the cellular infrastructure companies (see my email address) have marketed GPRS as a "high bandwidth" solution instead of an "always on" one. The carriers are just selling what they've been told.
// Alan Porter