Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 01:29:13 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@peorth.iteration.net> Cc: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.ORG>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: VCD (was Re: cvs commit: src/sys/dev/ata atapi-cd.c) Message-ID: <v04220825b6912c57be5b@[10.0.1.2]> In-Reply-To: <20010121181251.B44819@peorth.iteration.net> References: <200101211447.f0LElEk04073@mobile.wemm.org> <KAECKEJJOLGHAFGGNIKMAELICAAA.res02jw5@gte.net> <20010121145018.A73989@citusc17.usc.edu> <20010121165422.A44505@peorth.iteration.net> <v04220821b691222656eb@[10.0.1.2]> <20010121181251.B44819@peorth.iteration.net>
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At 6:12 PM -0600 2001/1/21, Michael C . Wu wrote: > Hmm? I can do that in Asia. But then there is no need to do so, > since Asian countries like Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan cover > every inch of their territories. (Benefit of a small country.) Do they cover all the mountainous areas? What about all rivers and caves? Can you be 100% guaranteed that no matter where you were to hike, camp, or do white-water rafting, you could always get full and complete coverage with all of the carriers in the country? You certainly can't get those kinds of guarantees over here, not even in a country like Belgium that has about the same land mass as the state of Maryland (one of the smaller states in the US), and with less population than the combined Washington, D.C. and Baltimore metropolitan areas (fifteen million people, total). > Switch a SIM card? Do you really want to carry around three SIM cards, three phone numbers, and have to be constantly switching between them to get coverage? You might as well have three cheap phones, one on each network, and be done with it. Did you know that you can't use any SMS gateway I know of to send SMS messages to customers that are not on the same carrier as the gateway? Sure, if you're a human being and you're typing in an SMS message, you can probably send it to any recipient on any carrier on any phone number. But if you want to receive automated SMS messages from a network monitoring system, you have to make sure that the carrier for the gateway machine is on the same carrier your phone is, otherwise it simply won't work. We have investigated this matter at length, and it looks like the only solution we have available to us is to set up three separate gateways, one for each carrier within the country. > The US carriers identify via the EIN of the phone. > But in reality, you really have no roaming between two carriers > much. e.g. AT&T phones will not work with Sprint networks. But Sprint phones have to work on all the analog networks (which they don't own), because their coverage is so incredibly crappy. You can't go more than a pencils width away from the major interstates, or outside the largest metropolitan areas, before you're off Sprint's network and one one that belongs to someone else. I've never, ever had a problem roaming on another network if that is what it took to get signal coverage, even if I was in an area that was supposedly covered by my carrier. All the GSM carriers over here have roaming arrangements with all the other GSM carriers outside of their respective countries, but roaming on a different network while you're inside the home country of your carrier just isn't possible. And sometimes that is a major, major pain-in-the-ass. > Bottom line, I like GSM for being the lesser evil. I'll take CDMA, any day. Fortunately, I won't have to wait too long before everything over here will be CDMA, and by then, maybe all the stupid little national carriers will have been consolidated into a small number of continental carriers that are all forced to have roaming arrangements with each other, and then we won't have any more of this incredibly stupid crap. -- These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy ====================================================================== Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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