16 Sep
2012
16 Sep
'12
11:16 a.m.
On Sun, 16 Sep 2012, Liam Proven wrote:
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)
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
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
Alexey