Before "roaming included" and "roaming at a fixed rate" were the norm, the carrier your roamed on would submit billing to your carrier, and your carrier would just put the charges on your bill (including such great items as "daily roamer fee" etc).
Nowadays, the carrier you're roaming on still submits billing to your carrier, but your carrier either doesn't just pass the charges through to you, they either eat the charge as part of their roaming included plan, or they charge your their pre-determined roaming rate
This system would work the same way. Depending on how expensive their roaming rates would be, your carrier would decide whether to include usage in a plane in their plan or charge you extra to recover their costs. Either way, the carrier providing service in the plane is making $$$ whenever someone uses their phone.
The only reason I could see cell phones being allowed is the use of CDMA technology. The short version is that with CDMA, all base stations are using the same frequencies. A handoff in this case is simpler because two adjacent base stations can broadcast on the same code without interfering with other users. The mobile can choose the stronger one.
The main problem with cellular phones in planes is that they would render the channel they are using useless in many cells. Cellular networks (well, except for CDMA based ones) depend on the fact that your phone's radio doesn't reach non-adjacent cells, so the same channel can be reused there. When you have line of site to all the cells in the same area your phone is going to reach more than one cell that uses the same channel, thus not allowing reuse of that channel.
CDMA is different, because the same channel is used on all cells (adjacent and non-adjacent), so obviously it doesn't depend on channel reuse. However, it does depend on PN offset reuse, ie it assigns your phone a PN offset with the assumption that your phone won't reach non-adjacent cells, which means that the same PN offset can be reused in those cells. So basically you have the same problem as with non-CDMA systems, just substitute "PN offset" for channel.
Uh, I think you're forgetting that GSM uses two different identifiers... IMEI, which is tied to the equipment, and IMSI, which is tied to the subscriber (it's stored in the SIM). If a provider wanted to shut *you* down, they would do this using the IMSI, not the IMEI. There is a very easy and legal way to change IMEIs: stick your SIM in another phone. Therefore, blocking by IMEI is only useful if you're targetting a specific phone, not a subscriber. I don't know if it's possible to modify the IMSI of your SIM card, but if it is it will only accomplish one thing: you won't be able to use it anymore, as the network won't recognize you as a subscriber anymore. Sure, this would achive privacy, but you can achieve the same result by throwing your SIM in the garbage...
But why on earth do you have a cell phone where _you_ pay for incoming calls?! The caller pays for the call on a land line, so how can you accept getting billed for someone calling you? Or I have misunderstood the whole piece, and you have forwarding to your cell phone from your land line or something...
It seems counterintuitive, but in fact it's a better idea. The vast majority of cellular plans in the US and Canada come with a bucket of minutes for a monthly fee. Often, but not always, there is a number of peak minutes and a large or unlimited number of off-peak minutes. Whenever you make or receive a call you don't pay anything extra unless you exceed your monthly allotment.
As long as you don't exceed your monthly minutes, neither you or the people calling you have to pay anything. In addition, you can get good pricing based on your monthly volume, which includes incoming traffic. And, your volume discount applies to your incoming calls as well. Using the caller-pays system the carriers have no incentive to lower the prices for incoming calls; in fact, they can use higher incoming rates to subsidize outgoing calls, making their product seem more appealing.
Caller-pays benefits only the carriers. I enjoy low rates here in the US, and I don't mind at all paying for incoming calls. I imagine that despite the fact that I pay for incoming calls my phone bill is not considerably higher than yours, if at all, assuming of course that we use a similar number of minutes. If you factor in the cost of the incoming calls you receive, the total cost is probably more than the total cost of the same usage in my situation.
Well, I tried to fork over some cash for a Loki game, but I failed. I tried to order Sim City online, sometime around November if I recall correctly. Now, I'm not a big fan of games and haven't bought one in several years (no, I don't pirate them either), but I like Sim City so I thought I'd buy it.
Apparently, it was out of stock. They didn't feel it was important to notify me of this fact, I only found out when I explicitly checked the status of my order a few days later. There was no indication of when and if it might become available again. However, they did place a preauhorization on my credit card right away. A couple of months later, I received an email from them apologizing and promising that it would be available soon, but if I wanted to cancel my order they'd understand. I didn't cancel my order. I haven't heard anything from them since.
I don't know how typical this experience is, but I do know that they didn't get my money although I tried.
What's missing is a way to have browsers accept long-duration cookies from such sites, but treat them like session cookies -- never store them on disk and forget them as soon as you go somewhere else.
You can do this (kind of) with Netscape 4.xx, at least under Linux. I haven't tried it with Mozilla or Netscape 6, it may very well work. The trick is to make the cookies.txt file read-only. Then cookies are accepted, but never written to the file; they stick around until you quit Netscape (or until it crashes:). What I used to do was to start with a clean cookies.txt, visit/. and a couple of other sites to get their cookie, and then make cookies.txt read only. This way I kept the cookies I wanted long term, and everything else for the duration of the session...
Just now phones are starting to have GSM 900/1800/1900 as a standard and now we have GSM 800 as well.
I thought that AT&T is actually going to be using the 1900Mhz licenses they have in some markets, and maybe get licenses in other markets as well. But I could be wrong. In any case, I believe that there will soon be (or is it out already?) GSM-450 as well, running on the NMT-450 spectrum that is being phased out (in Finland, Sweden, anywhere else?)
That means, to cover all these phones, you need *5* base stations.
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.
I find the speed bump analogy in the interview interesting, because speed bumps are also devices that punish the legitimate users. Doesn't matter how slowly you drive over them, you're still being punished. Sure, they might discourage someone from driving like crazy, but the people that we going to are probably just going to drive really fast between bumps and slow down at the last minute.
Re:Telcos: chronically behind on their own data
on
Stopping The 56K Hate
·
· Score: 2
(even managers who said they would call back wouldn't.)
If anyone has been called back from Pacbell/SBC DSL customer service, I'd like to know about it. I went through an ordeal with them that lasted a couple of months, and talked to their customer "service" almost on a daily basis (well, at least on weekdays anyway). There was no resolution in any of the calls, so every single time I was promised a call back and never received one. The sample seems too large to consider this just bad luck. So I'm really wondering if they just never ever call people back. Wouldn't surprise me...
No, the modem can't go over 56kbps, but you have to remember that this is raw bandwidth. The data gets compressed before going on the wire, so if you're transfering data that's highly compressible (like a text file), you'll see higher effective throughput.
However, the FCC won't let it go faster then 53Kbs. Even then, you'll be lucky to connect at 48Kbs (6Kb/sec) on older phone lines.
That's not (entirely) true. The FCC only limits the maximum power level on the line. This limits the number of PCM codes that are available for the modem to use. For X2, the proprietary 56k protocol developed by 3Com (or was it still USRobotics?) before V90 was adopted, it meant that it could not go above 53kbps. V90 on the other hand, is able to connect at 56kbps and stay within the limit, although it's obviously much harder than if the limit wasn't there. So, while highly unlikely, it is possible to connect at 56kbps with V90 in the US.
I personally connect at 49,333 every time, on a local loop that is more than 17kfeet long.
And why nearly all of you run around with this ugly analog cell Phones (with this pull-out Antennas *shudder*) while analog cell Phone systems got shut
down in Europe years ago, and everyone got gsm ?;)
You probably haven't been to the US in the last couple of years, because you hardly see analog phones any more (at least in metro areas)... But in any case, why adoption of digital has been slower in the US (and Canada, for that matter) is a long discussion, that I'm not going to start right now because it's almost 3am;-).
btw, my original message to which you replied wasn't suggesting that the US is way ahead of the Scandinavian countries when it comes to mobile communications. I was correcting another poster that claimed that Finland and Sweden were *30 years* ahead in cellular technology, and based that claim on a different technology (radio telephones). We can certainly have a long argument on the relative merits of the ways things happened in North America vs Europe in the cellular industry, but this wasn't my point.
Well, I never suggested that radio telephones are inherently automatic. In fact elsewhere in this article I mentioned that while the first radio phones were manual, later models were automatic.
I did another quick search, but I can't find any indication that the system you are talking about was cellular. I don't think cellular is an ambiguous term. It means that the coverage area is divided into smaller areas (cells), each served by a relatively low power transmitter. Non-adjacent cells can use the same channels, and calls are handed off from one cell to another as the user moves in the cellular system (which requires that cells have some overlap, obviously).
So, please, point me to a reference that shows that the 1955 system was cellular, as opposed to automatic radiophone. If this is the case, I'll admit the error of my ways, and will have learned something new in the process. I have done my homework, and I haven't found any evidence that there were any commercial cellular systems anywhere in the 1950s...
"PCS" (personal communication services) was never intended to be anything execept a marketing term which implied "We're better than Cellular. Oh,
and you can get paging".
Technically, PCS refers to the 1900Mhz that the FCC allocated for cellular (for cellular, there is also a PCS paging band allocated, I think). The problem is the way the term was used by marketing, but you can always count on them to do something wrong... People keep comparing PCS with cellular, as if they are two distinct things, and even worse you have companies like Sprint that claim to be "the clear alternative to cellular".
I like the word cellular. It's not too general, like mobile or radiophone would be, but it's not too specific either: it could be analog or digital, 800, 900 or 1900Mhz, CDMA or GSM etc.
Scandinavians had mobile in 50s USA has always been slow at mobile comunications. Not because this stuff was not available in USA it means the rest
of the world did not have it. first cell phone call was made in 1955. then in the 60s there was a provider for scandinavian countries.
Sorry to tell you that these were not cellular phones, just mobile radio telephones, and that these were also available in the US. Commercial cellular service started in the (very) early 1980s (don't remember exactly), and Scandinavian countries did beat the US to it by a couple of years. IIRC the first commercial system in the US went live in 1984 in Chicago. I believe that there was a considerable delay between the time AMPS was ready and the time it went live, because it happened at the same time as the AT&T breakup.
So, next time do your homework before trying to educate all of us about the technological inferiority of the US.
Well, the much abused term "PCS" is actually supposed to mean 1900Mhz, so this is why you can't get a "PCS" signal at 400Mhz;-). (I really dislike the term "PCS" and all the confusion it causes... Many people seem to think that a "PCS" phone is something different from a cellular phone, and that it's somehow inherently better/worse, depending on who you ask).
Seriously, there are reasons why you can't have cellular at any frequency... I don't pretend to understand RF very much, but different freqencies spread in different ways in the environment. Cellular technology depends on geographic channel reuse to achieve high capacity... The more able you are to control how far a signal travels before it becomes irrelevant, the smaller cells you can make, and thus the higher capacity you can achieve. This is why cellular systems use high frequencies, close-to-microwave or microwave. I'm not sure what is a good practical limit, but if you go too low the signals travel too far to make them practical for cellular systems.
Since you mentioned 400Mhz, there *are* cellular systems at 400Mhz. The first version of NMT was at 400Mhz (later it was also offered at 900Mhz), and I believe there was an early 400Mhz system in use in Alberta, Canada at some point. My understanding is that they are good for rural areas... AFAIK NMT-400 systems are still live, and there is a GSM-400 standard in the works, which will gradually replace NMT-400.
I have a phone that's about 6 years old, and by
todays standards is considered massive, but only lasts 8 hours or so, with less than an hour of conversation.
Although battery capacities (relative to weight) have improved a lot since 6 years ago (thanks to NiMH and LiIon batteries), the main reason we have much better standby and talk times today is because analog phones (that were the norm a few years ago) use a lot more power than digital phones, both in standby and when you're on a call.
As others mentioned, yes, there were mobile phones since the 1950s or so, but they were not cellular. They were two-way radios, with the base station connected to the phone system. There was only one base station, so both it and the mobile stations has to use high power transmitters to cover an entire city. Only a few channels were allocated, so since there was no channel reuse (which is what cellular technology is all about) the capacity of the system was very small. Also, at first you had to ask an operator to place your calls, although later on direct dial systems appeared as well.
I can only speak from personal experience, but in the 1.5 years that I have had DSL with PacBell/PBI I have only been without service for about 72 hours.
This includes all maintenance windows and unscheduled outages.
I have no doubts that PacBell DSL can be and is trouble-free for many people. I know some of them myself. You are one of the lucky ones, I am one of the unlucky ones.
However, things break and no DSL provider can avoid this. The question is how do they handle that. In my (and many others' as well, it turns out) experience, they show no interest in fixing problems. This is why I'm unhappy with PacBell. Not because it broke in the first place (as I said, things can and do break), but because they refuse to fix things that are broken. I really hope that your DSL service will continue working great, because if it breaks (and doesn't happen to fix itself) you are likely to have a very hard time getting it to work again (if at all, I am losing hope).
Of course, I could just be very unlucky, but I have talked to at least 20 different people at their customer support line, so I think I eliminated chance as a factor. Plus, many reviews on dslreports.com describe the same problem.
Don't even bother with the BBB. Go straight to the Public Utilities Commission.
I thought about it, but I'm not sure whether the CPUC will do any good. Isn't DSL (and Internet access in general) a service that's not regulated? Can the CPUC do anything about services that it doesn't regulate?
You're joking, right? PacBell Internet Services has, by far, the worst customer service I have ever experienced. I've been trying to get them to fix a problem with my connection (it goes down for hours every night), and not only has it not been fixed yet, but they won't even call me back even though I've asked them to every time. Their customer support people are generally not rude, but are clueless beyond belief and are unable to handle anything that falls outside their script.
I've given up on calling them about a week ago, but I did submit a complaint via the San Francisco/Oakland BBB. No response yet.
If you think that my terrible customer service experience is an isolated incident, I encourage you to take a look at the review at www.dslreports.com, and at their rating with the
San Francisco/Oakland BBB (they claim that this company has an unsatisfactory record, and a pattern of ignoring customer complaints).
balloons are in the stratosphere i.e they move
satellites are in geostationary orbit i.e they don't move relative to the earths rotation. You need to
know where the object routing the signals is in order to do this, and balloons just don't cut it
Well, satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit don't move relative to the earth, but there are satellites that are *not* in geosynchronous orbit. To pick some unrelated examples, Iridium, Globalstar and Teledesic (if and when it becomes operational) are all networks of several satellites in lower orbits, and they do indeed move relative to the earth. I don't know what other limitations balloons have, but moving relative to the earth shouldn't be the problem (unless of course their orbit is much much lower and their relative speed is much greater. That might make a difference, I don't know).
I don't know what the problem of the CPUC is. I recently moved to California, and I have to say that they have the most messed up dialing scheme
I've encountered. Because of their obsession against 10 digit dialling and overlays, they have a mess of geographically tiny area codes. Calls to
different area codes, whether local or toll require 1+area code. Calls in the same area code can be dialled with just seven digits regardless of
whether they are toll or not. I am quite surprised that they think that 10 digit dialing would confuse people as to what is local and what isn't, since
there is no way of knowing right now, short of waiting for the bill to arrive or looking up which exchanges are local from where you are calling.
Ideally, I would like to see this dialing scheme:
Require 10 digits on local calls
Require 1+10 digits on toll calls
Allow 1+10 digits for local calls. This way people who don't care about local/toll can call all their calls this way and have them go through, but
no one can accidentantly make a toll call unless they dial 1.
Unfortunatelly, the CPUC seems to think that taking away 7 digit dialing is the greatest evil. There were four area code overlays planned in the bay
area, for 408, 415, 650 and 510, and they were all cancelled. At least 408 is now in serious trouble of running out of phone numbers. They are
conserving numbers now, but I fear that at some point they will resort to another split... btw, under the original overlay plan all calls would be 1+10
digits, so there still wouldn't be local/toll distinction.
I have no data to support this, but I suspect that there are such exchanges as 408-650 and 650-408 in use, which would prevent a switch to 10 digit
dialing with a transition period. I think the only way for California to switch to 10 digit dialing is to
Set a date after which 7 digit dialing won't be allowed. In other words, everyone has to dial 11 digits for all calls.
After everyone is used to 11 digits for all calls, no one is dialling 7 digits anymore, so there is no ambiguity and 10 digit dialing can now be
allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
Nowadays, the carrier you're roaming on still submits billing to your carrier, but your carrier either doesn't just pass the charges through to you, they either eat the charge as part of their roaming included plan, or they charge your their pre-determined roaming rate
This system would work the same way. Depending on how expensive their roaming rates would be, your carrier would decide whether to include usage in a plane in their plan or charge you extra to recover their costs. Either way, the carrier providing service in the plane is making $$$ whenever someone uses their phone.
The main problem with cellular phones in planes is that they would render the channel they are using useless in many cells. Cellular networks (well, except for CDMA based ones) depend on the fact that your phone's radio doesn't reach non-adjacent cells, so the same channel can be reused there. When you have line of site to all the cells in the same area your phone is going to reach more than one cell that uses the same channel, thus not allowing reuse of that channel.
CDMA is different, because the same channel is used on all cells (adjacent and non-adjacent), so obviously it doesn't depend on channel reuse. However, it does depend on PN offset reuse, ie it assigns your phone a PN offset with the assumption that your phone won't reach non-adjacent cells, which means that the same PN offset can be reused in those cells. So basically you have the same problem as with non-CDMA systems, just substitute "PN offset" for channel.
Uh, I think you're forgetting that GSM uses two different identifiers... IMEI, which is tied to the equipment, and IMSI, which is tied to the subscriber (it's stored in the SIM). If a provider wanted to shut *you* down, they would do this using the IMSI, not the IMEI. There is a very easy and legal way to change IMEIs: stick your SIM in another phone. Therefore, blocking by IMEI is only useful if you're targetting a specific phone, not a subscriber. I don't know if it's possible to modify the IMSI of your SIM card, but if it is it will only accomplish one thing: you won't be able to use it anymore, as the network won't recognize you as a subscriber anymore. Sure, this would achive privacy, but you can achieve the same result by throwing your SIM in the garbage...
It seems counterintuitive, but in fact it's a better idea. The vast majority of cellular plans in the US and Canada come with a bucket of minutes for a monthly fee. Often, but not always, there is a number of peak minutes and a large or unlimited number of off-peak minutes. Whenever you make or receive a call you don't pay anything extra unless you exceed your monthly allotment.
As long as you don't exceed your monthly minutes, neither you or the people calling you have to pay anything. In addition, you can get good pricing based on your monthly volume, which includes incoming traffic. And, your volume discount applies to your incoming calls as well. Using the caller-pays system the carriers have no incentive to lower the prices for incoming calls; in fact, they can use higher incoming rates to subsidize outgoing calls, making their product seem more appealing.
Caller-pays benefits only the carriers. I enjoy low rates here in the US, and I don't mind at all paying for incoming calls. I imagine that despite the fact that I pay for incoming calls my phone bill is not considerably higher than yours, if at all, assuming of course that we use a similar number of minutes. If you factor in the cost of the incoming calls you receive, the total cost is probably more than the total cost of the same usage in my situation.
Apparently, it was out of stock. They didn't feel it was important to notify me of this fact, I only found out when I explicitly checked the status of my order a few days later. There was no indication of when and if it might become available again. However, they did place a preauhorization on my credit card right away. A couple of months later, I received an email from them apologizing and promising that it would be available soon, but if I wanted to cancel my order they'd understand. I didn't cancel my order. I haven't heard anything from them since.
I don't know how typical this experience is, but I do know that they didn't get my money although I tried.
You can do this (kind of) with Netscape 4.xx, at least under Linux. I haven't tried it with Mozilla or Netscape 6, it may very well work. The trick is to make the cookies.txt file read-only. Then cookies are accepted, but never written to the file; they stick around until you quit Netscape (or until it crashes :). What I used to do was to start with a clean cookies.txt, visit /. and a couple of other sites to get their cookie, and then make cookies.txt read only. This way I kept the cookies I wanted long term, and everything else for the duration of the session...
I thought that AT&T is actually going to be using the 1900Mhz licenses they have in some markets, and maybe get licenses in other markets as well. But I could be wrong. In any case, I believe that there will soon be (or is it out already?) GSM-450 as well, running on the NMT-450 spectrum that is being phased out (in Finland, Sweden, anywhere else?)
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.
I find the speed bump analogy in the interview interesting, because speed bumps are also devices that punish the legitimate users. Doesn't matter how slowly you drive over them, you're still being punished. Sure, they might discourage someone from driving like crazy, but the people that we going to are probably just going to drive really fast between bumps and slow down at the last minute.
If anyone has been called back from Pacbell/SBC DSL customer service, I'd like to know about it. I went through an ordeal with them that lasted a couple of months, and talked to their customer "service" almost on a daily basis (well, at least on weekdays anyway). There was no resolution in any of the calls, so every single time I was promised a call back and never received one. The sample seems too large to consider this just bad luck. So I'm really wondering if they just never ever call people back. Wouldn't surprise me...
No, the modem can't go over 56kbps, but you have to remember that this is raw bandwidth. The data gets compressed before going on the wire, so if you're transfering data that's highly compressible (like a text file), you'll see higher effective throughput.
That's not (entirely) true. The FCC only limits the maximum power level on the line. This limits the number of PCM codes that are available for the modem to use. For X2, the proprietary 56k protocol developed by 3Com (or was it still USRobotics?) before V90 was adopted, it meant that it could not go above 53kbps. V90 on the other hand, is able to connect at 56kbps and stay within the limit, although it's obviously much harder than if the limit wasn't there. So, while highly unlikely, it is possible to connect at 56kbps with V90 in the US.
I personally connect at 49,333 every time, on a local loop that is more than 17kfeet long.
You probably haven't been to the US in the last couple of years, because you hardly see analog phones any more (at least in metro areas)... But in any case, why adoption of digital has been slower in the US (and Canada, for that matter) is a long discussion, that I'm not going to start right now because it's almost 3am ;-).
btw, my original message to which you replied wasn't suggesting that the US is way ahead of the Scandinavian countries when it comes to mobile communications. I was correcting another poster that claimed that Finland and Sweden were *30 years* ahead in cellular technology, and based that claim on a different technology (radio telephones). We can certainly have a long argument on the relative merits of the ways things happened in North America vs Europe in the cellular industry, but this wasn't my point.
I did another quick search, but I can't find any indication that the system you are talking about was cellular. I don't think cellular is an ambiguous term. It means that the coverage area is divided into smaller areas (cells), each served by a relatively low power transmitter. Non-adjacent cells can use the same channels, and calls are handed off from one cell to another as the user moves in the cellular system (which requires that cells have some overlap, obviously).
So, please, point me to a reference that shows that the 1955 system was cellular, as opposed to automatic radiophone. If this is the case, I'll admit the error of my ways, and will have learned something new in the process. I have done my homework, and I haven't found any evidence that there were any commercial cellular systems anywhere in the 1950s...
Technically, PCS refers to the 1900Mhz that the FCC allocated for cellular (for cellular, there is also a PCS paging band allocated, I think). The problem is the way the term was used by marketing, but you can always count on them to do something wrong... People keep comparing PCS with cellular, as if they are two distinct things, and even worse you have companies like Sprint that claim to be "the clear alternative to cellular".
I like the word cellular. It's not too general, like mobile or radiophone would be, but it's not too specific either: it could be analog or digital, 800, 900 or 1900Mhz, CDMA or GSM etc.
Sorry to tell you that these were not cellular phones, just mobile radio telephones, and that these were also available in the US. Commercial cellular service started in the (very) early 1980s (don't remember exactly), and Scandinavian countries did beat the US to it by a couple of years. IIRC the first commercial system in the US went live in 1984 in Chicago. I believe that there was a considerable delay between the time AMPS was ready and the time it went live, because it happened at the same time as the AT&T breakup.
So, next time do your homework before trying to educate all of us about the technological inferiority of the US.
Seriously, there are reasons why you can't have cellular at any frequency... I don't pretend to understand RF very much, but different freqencies spread in different ways in the environment. Cellular technology depends on geographic channel reuse to achieve high capacity... The more able you are to control how far a signal travels before it becomes irrelevant, the smaller cells you can make, and thus the higher capacity you can achieve. This is why cellular systems use high frequencies, close-to-microwave or microwave. I'm not sure what is a good practical limit, but if you go too low the signals travel too far to make them practical for cellular systems.
Since you mentioned 400Mhz, there *are* cellular systems at 400Mhz. The first version of NMT was at 400Mhz (later it was also offered at 900Mhz), and I believe there was an early 400Mhz system in use in Alberta, Canada at some point. My understanding is that they are good for rural areas... AFAIK NMT-400 systems are still live, and there is a GSM-400 standard in the works, which will gradually replace NMT-400.
Although battery capacities (relative to weight) have improved a lot since 6 years ago (thanks to NiMH and LiIon batteries), the main reason we have much better standby and talk times today is because analog phones (that were the norm a few years ago) use a lot more power than digital phones, both in standby and when you're on a call.
As others mentioned, yes, there were mobile phones since the 1950s or so, but they were not cellular. They were two-way radios, with the base station connected to the phone system. There was only one base station, so both it and the mobile stations has to use high power transmitters to cover an entire city. Only a few channels were allocated, so since there was no channel reuse (which is what cellular technology is all about) the capacity of the system was very small. Also, at first you had to ask an operator to place your calls, although later on direct dial systems appeared as well.
I have no doubts that PacBell DSL can be and is trouble-free for many people. I know some of them myself. You are one of the lucky ones, I am one of the unlucky ones.
However, things break and no DSL provider can avoid this. The question is how do they handle that. In my (and many others' as well, it turns out) experience, they show no interest in fixing problems. This is why I'm unhappy with PacBell. Not because it broke in the first place (as I said, things can and do break), but because they refuse to fix things that are broken. I really hope that your DSL service will continue working great, because if it breaks (and doesn't happen to fix itself) you are likely to have a very hard time getting it to work again (if at all, I am losing hope).
Of course, I could just be very unlucky, but I have talked to at least 20 different people at their customer support line, so I think I eliminated chance as a factor. Plus, many reviews on dslreports.com describe the same problem.
I thought about it, but I'm not sure whether the CPUC will do any good. Isn't DSL (and Internet access in general) a service that's not regulated? Can the CPUC do anything about services that it doesn't regulate?
You're joking, right? PacBell Internet Services has, by far, the worst customer service I have ever experienced. I've been trying to get them to fix a problem with my connection (it goes down for hours every night), and not only has it not been fixed yet, but they won't even call me back even though I've asked them to every time. Their customer support people are generally not rude, but are clueless beyond belief and are unable to handle anything that falls outside their script.
I've given up on calling them about a week ago, but I did submit a complaint via the San Francisco/Oakland BBB. No response yet.
If you think that my terrible customer service experience is an isolated incident, I encourage you to take a look at the review at www.dslreports.com, and at their rating with the San Francisco/Oakland BBB (they claim that this company has an unsatisfactory record, and a pattern of ignoring customer complaints).
Well, satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit don't move relative to the earth, but there are satellites that are *not* in geosynchronous orbit. To pick some unrelated examples, Iridium, Globalstar and Teledesic (if and when it becomes operational) are all networks of several satellites in lower orbits, and they do indeed move relative to the earth. I don't know what other limitations balloons have, but moving relative to the earth shouldn't be the problem (unless of course their orbit is much much lower and their relative speed is much greater. That might make a difference, I don't know).
Ideally, I would like to see this dialing scheme:
- Require 10 digits on local calls
- Require 1+10 digits on toll calls
- Allow 1+10 digits for local calls. This way people who don't care about local/toll can call all their calls this way and have them go through, but
no one can accidentantly make a toll call unless they dial 1.
Unfortunatelly, the CPUC seems to think that taking away 7 digit dialing is the greatest evil. There were four area code overlays planned in the bay area, for 408, 415, 650 and 510, and they were all cancelled. At least 408 is now in serious trouble of running out of phone numbers. They are conserving numbers now, but I fear that at some point they will resort to another split... btw, under the original overlay plan all calls would be 1+10 digits, so there still wouldn't be local/toll distinction.I have no data to support this, but I suspect that there are such exchanges as 408-650 and 650-408 in use, which would prevent a switch to 10 digit dialing with a transition period. I think the only way for California to switch to 10 digit dialing is to
Oops, sorry, this was supposed to be for another story...