Asia Opens Up to WLAN

enough2000 writes "As Unstrung reports: "Five of Asia's biggest carriers have given the public Wireless LAN market a hefty boost by announcing what they modestly claim is the world's first and largest wireless broadband alliance. Korea Telecom, China Netcom Corp. Ltd., Maxis (Malaysia), StarHub (Singapore), and Telstra Corp.(Australia) have agreed to open up their networks to allow wireless LAN users to roam from one country to another. Tests begin in July, although no specific launch date has been set." Full article is here."

Comments

Re:Great, thats all we need

[gowen]

Err nope. I keep stats on these things. Of the last 8,000 spams I've received, over 5,500 originated from APNIC IP addresses, the vast majority of those from Korea, China and Taiwan. Add to that that Telstra recently imposed a Usenet Death Penalty on itself -- to avoid an external one -- because of the amount of spam coming from its servers. I have no problem with Chinese or Korean people, and the only reason I don't like Australians is because they're too good at cricket.

The amount of US (Roadrunner, SWBell and Pacbell) and UK (Ntlworld ADSL) spam *is* on the increase, though.

Even if...

[interactive_civilian]

I think you wanted to say I-Mode :)

Even if that is the case (which it is), iMode is not G3. The current G3 system in Japan is the NTT DoCoMo Foma system. While Foma can access iMode sites (which really are normal internet sites which you can access with you web-browser, with some special characters for smileys and such), non-G3 phones can also access them, as can your regular internet connection. For example, I currently use DoCoMo with a Panasonic P503i phone, which is not G3. My phone bandwidth is 9600bps...but I can use iMode and iAppli (Java apps on your phone).

Of course, the G3 system, which currently runs at 384Kbps, is really expensive. NTT charges based on the number of packets instead of connection time, or even a flat rate, unlimited connection fee (unlike DDI Pocket, which I use and runs at 128KBpbs).

Anyway, I am looking forward to when J-phone and/or DDI Pocket start implementing their own G3 networks as they tend to have much better pricing options than NTT DoCoMo.