I don't know if this is the same as 'ratified' but at least it means that people can start implementing it! This will mean more competition in our Market. In the US verizon will really compete with AT&T and T-Mobile because devices will be portable. Sprint is still doing their WiMAX thing - which isn't bad, but I won't be going to Sprint to my mobile needs.

In Canada this means that all carriers will be using the same technology, so Bell, Telus and Rogers will now see real competition because the handsets will have the potential to be unlock and brought with you to another carrier

The future looks bright! (now if data package prices were to fall...)

Tags: LTE, technology, GSM, telephony

I've been looking at phones lately (no thanks to the iPhone!) and I must say that I am seeing some absurdities with the selection of bands. GSM had five bands (frequencies), although only four are used. THe original band was 900Mhz, then 1800Mhz rolled out in Europe, 1900Mhz and 850Mhz followed suit in the Americas and 450Mhz was tested but never deployed. This was a 2G technology

Now we've got 3G rolling out. We started with 2100Mhz and we rejoiced! This would be the one band to unify the world! Well, no! at&t came in and decided to use 1900Mhz and 850Mhz as well! OK, phones are triband 3G now (well some anyway), and T-Mobile US comes out with 1700Mhz, and some carriers in Europe are experimenting with 900Mhz...that's five bands!

Nokia phones aren't triband (the iPhone and some HTC handsets are). With nokia handsets you get 2100, or 1900/850, or 2100/900 or 2100/850... Just make a quintband 3G chip already! I wonder what LTE is going to bring...

This sort of reminds me of a recent Hollowmen episode I watched. The think tank had a 6-point plan for the Prime Minister, but they could not implement it. So... they came up with a 4-point plan, to make the 6-point plan a 2-point plan. Hillarious, until you think about it!

Tags: GSM, frequencies, UMTS, Phones, telephony

In the past, my gripe about US cellular technologies has been that there is no standardization, so I can’t just buy a phone and go to any carrier (like I can in the rest of the world). The US used GSM, iDEN, CDMA, TDMA and AMPS. Luckily in recent years it’s really just come down to GSM and CDMA since the rest of the technologies are already laid to rest (AMPS and TDMA) or have one foot in the grace (iDEN). Most phones are Quadband GSM, so I can use my Phone with AT&T, T-Mobile, or any of the MVNOs that are on GSM.

3G is a bit of a quagmire. Most of the word uses the 1900/2100Mhz frequency pair for UMTS (3G GSM). The US on the other hand uses the 850Mhz, 1900Mhz and 1700/2100 pair for 3G. There are no Quadband 3G phones (yet). This is somewhat problematic for a ‘one phone for any carrier’ type of person…and CDMA is still holding in there, which means that I can’t just take my AT&T phone to Verizon, Sprint or AllTel (or Bell and Telus in Canada).

Here comes 4G. Of course 4G is 3 years (or so) into the future. All existing GSM/UMTS carriers around the world have decided that they are going with LTE for the 4G technology. Verizon announced that they are going to LTE, recently so did AllTel. Cool! This means, that when the time comes, I can have one phone that will work around the world, with any carrier! Just swap out the SIM! If I get sick of AT&T, I can go to Verizon, or T-Mobile, or AllTel. Sprint on the other hand…who knows! They might be bought by Deutche Telekom in the next few years, so they may be part of T-Mobile

Tags: GSM, CDMA, LTE, UMTS, telephony

I was reading one of my RSS feeds this afternoon and I saw that Samsung has come up with a Dual SIM phone that can receive calls/data/messages from both SIMs simultaneously. Pretty cool, huh? I could use one of these phones as my main phone, pop in my AT&T SIM and my Cosmote SIM and have access to both my Greek and US number at the same time! Of course there is only one problem, the phone is triband GSM (900/1800/1900).

Come on! It’s 2008 already! The 850Mhz frequency has been in use for at least 4 years now, and Quadband GSM chips are everywhere, even in Nokia phones! I don’t get why companies bring out phones that are not Quadband. Quadband GSM should be the minimum requirement for all GSM phones.

Of course the best solution would be to have all phones be Quandband GSM (850/900/1800/1900) and Quintband HSPA (850/900/1900/1700/2100) so you can access high speed 3G speeds around the globe.

I am not the globe trotter I used to be, so in theory I should not care as much for the non-US frequencies, but it makes me feel nice to know that if I wanted to go to France tomorrow I could access their 3G networks, and when I came back and wanted to switch from AT&T to T-Mobile I could have access to that 3G network as well!

Tags: GSM, Phones, triband, WTF, samsung

Some of my friends always bring up the fact that other mobile technologies, not just GSM, have SIM cards!
They are of course correct! CDMA (verizon, sprint, telus, bell, KTF,KDDI, etc.), iDEN (nextel), PHS (willcom) all either already use SIM cards, or have the ability to use them. Of course there are a few things to note about each technology (and why I stay away from it).

CDMA - CDMA has the RUIM, which is CDMA's equivalent to the SIM. In North America at this point, CDMA has quite a lot of coverage, however RUIM is not implemented, and companies are staying away from the RUIM because it endangers their walled garden business model. What would be the point of the RUIM if you cannot get unbranded phones to work on the network? There are a number of CDMA phones available, but they are generally not unbranded and not in numerous, like their GSM counterparts. CDMA is also not as global as GSM. The only CDMA networks using RUIM are the rural CDMA450 networks in eastern europe and russia, and Three in Hong Kong (with only two phones in their line up.

iDEN - iDEN has been using SIMs since day one on their system. There is only one carrier (nextel) in the US, so the number of phones are limited. There also aren't that many global carriers for iDEN, so it's not like you can go abroad and get a prepaid SIM for your iDEN phone . Motorola had made a couple of iDEN/GSM hybrids, but they haven't made any recently. It would be cool if all iDEN phones were iDEN/GSM hybrids

PHS - well...PHS is not available here It's also rarer than iDEN globally


So, yes! Other technologies have

Tags: CDMA, iDEN, GSM, PHS, SIM, RUIM, choice, technology, mobile phones

Some of my friends and family here in the US really scratch their head and wonder why I have such an insistence on using a GSM carrier. There are a number of reasons, but I think that the main reason is the SIM card. SIM is an acronym for Subscriber Information Module and its job is to keep your information on it; so your phone number and account number is on the card, no matter what phone the card is in! If you break your phone, you can buy a cheap phone, stick your SIM in it, and you're good to go! No need to go to the at&t (or t-mobile) store, get charged activation fees, and waste your time (and money) for nothing.
Way back when (in 1996) the SIM only had 8 kilobytes of memory, these days they come in 64k and 128k varieties which allow the use to store short messages on the SIM, store their phonebook, and they provide SIM application toolkits. SIM toolkits allow for certain value added applications, like mobile banking and on demand news by SMS, to be included in the SIM card itself. In short, this means that no matter what phone you put in your SIM in, you will have your addressbook, your provider's applications and your saved SMS messages.

Conversely, you can put any SIM in your phone. If you are traveling abroad, and you don't want to use your home provider with roaming (due to the insane roaming costs), you can easily get SIM-only prepaid packages. This gives you a SIM with a local number for that country. Take a country like Greece for example. You can get SIMs from eight different providers, this means that you can pick and choose which company you want to give your money to, based on the service they provide and costs associated.

Tags: GSM, UMTS, SIM, technology, mobile phones