16 Sep
2012
16 Sep
'12
11:59 a.m.
On 16 September 2012 19:16, Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt at freeshell.org> wrote:
On Sun, 16 Sep 2012, Liam Proven wrote:
I did in 1999 or so, actually. Well, it was tri-band and worked
everywhere I've ever even heard of. Motorola Timeport 7089, I think.
Oddly, only the German Wikipedia has a page on it, but you can see one here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-band_device
I sold one last month, as a matter of fact. Only fetched about ?3-?4,
but that's pretty good for a 13y old phone!
I later replaced it with a quad-band phone, I think.
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone
system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
Incorrect. First, GSM is one set of standards (mostly; telco standards are a
special kind of hell), but it operates on no less than 14 frequency bands:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands
Good luck finding a phone that supports all of them! But wait, there's 3G
now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS_frequency_bands
And let's not forget LTE, which changes the radio interface _again_:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)
Yuh-huh. I do actually know a little bit about this stuff; Q.v.
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/05/24/wtf_is_4g/
But that's just the GSM family! Let's not
forget that Japan and the nordic
countries did their own thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Handy-phone_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Mobile_Telephone
NMT was in some ways an ancestor of GSM, was it not? I forget the details now...
And then of course, some 'American' network
technologies had major
deployments outside the USA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Digital_Enhanced_Network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS-95
Yes, true, but fortunately, they did not do very well and have now
pretty much all died out.
Japan always has had a fondness for weird proprietary stuff. AIUI
they've come round now on phone standards, though, no?
Something I learned relatively recently about American mobiles - that
the old, pre-GSM phones didn't have SIM cards? You couldn't move your
phone from one network to another? Is that correct? That *amazed* me.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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