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Life on the Road with 3G
david_adams writes "Since I first evaluated Sprint's new Vision "3G" high speed wireless data service in September of last year, I've had the opportunity to travel around the country, using the service to keep in touch with the world, receive all my spam, er, email, and do my work. I've used the service in hotels, restaurants, parked cars, moving cars, picnic tables, and airports, in huge cities, and in desolate stretches of interstate highway. Here are my impressions after this long term test."
In Europe at least the 3G vendors like Hutchison and Vodafone will be sweating a little over whether Wi-Fi hotspots will steal potential market share away from their target markets.
Wi-Fi = cheaper, more widely supported. Also 3G handsets are going to be too expesive for most users, for a few years anyway.
Could be interesting to see how the technologies mature and maybe merge (3G PCMCIA cards?)
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
SMS messages aren't cheaper. As they are unregulated they are cash cows for the telcos and a lot more expensive. They are popular because they are convenient and fun. Watching a football (soccer) game you can send a message without having to go into the whole how's the wife/kids/job/mortgage guff.
So first of all, the /. title and the title of the article are "Life on the road with 3G," when he's not even using 3G? What the heck? From what I understand, 2.5G is an order of magnitude slower than 3G, isn't it?
Secondly, the whole article is pretty much a gripe/review of the specific Samsung A500 Hardware that he's using, and hardly even goes into the 2.5G service?!??! Thanks, buddy, for letting me know that the A500 has A. a crappy web browser, B. a crappy cable, and C. no bluetooth (crappy). I'm also glad to know that you think SMS is useless. That's really great to know IN YOUR SUPPOSED REVIEW OF 3G. WTF.
I know this has been said a bajillion times before, but could the editors please stop to read the stories they post once in a while?
wow, that's new. My mobile is a year old and supported GPRS (ie G2.5) on Orange out of the box. Granted I'm in the UK, but this isn't really new and it is defiantly not G3.
The huge problem with G2.5 is not bandwidth, but latency. If you try running TCPIP over GPRS, it all goes to pot due to the 2sec+ latency. TCP is just not optimised to work well with such a long delay. Hopefully G3 will perform better than this.
Oh and try to convince any european teenager that SMS is a waste of time. I have a contract which gives me loads of free off-peak min (to any network) but charges me a small fortune to make calls during the day. For me a 1 min call during the day to a mobile on a different network costs the same as 5 or 6 text messages.
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