From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Jan 21 17: 5:19 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mail.enteract.com (mail.enteract.com [207.229.143.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 089A337B401; Sun, 21 Jan 2001 17:05:01 -0800 (PST) Received: from shell-2.enteract.com (dscheidt@shell-2.enteract.com [207.229.143.41]) by mail.enteract.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id TAA56476; Sun, 21 Jan 2001 19:04:53 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from dscheidt@enteract.com) Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 19:04:52 -0600 (CST) From: David Scheidt To: "Michael C . Wu" Cc: Brad Knowles , Kris Kennaway , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: VCD (was Re: cvs commit: src/sys/dev/ata atapi-cd.c) In-Reply-To: <20010121181251.B44819@peorth.iteration.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Michael C . Wu wrote: :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. There's all sorts of inter-carrier roaming going onr, and htere has been for quite some time -- well before digital cellular, in fact. It works very well, if the carriers cooperate, and is usually transparent to the user of the phone, and anyone trying to call them. The reason that an AT&T wireless phone won't work on the sprint network is that AWE is a TDMA carrier, at 1.9GHz some places, and at 800MHz in others. Sprint are exclusively a 1.9 GHz CDMA carrier. If you've got the necessary sprint telephone, you can roam on the analog bits of the AT&T wireless network. In fact, if you leave the major interstates, and the relitively few cities sprint have properly built up (as opposed to the ones they sell service in...), you'll do lots of roaming on other carrier's networks. I've been an AWE wireless customer for years, and haven't encountered anywhere my phone wouldn't work transparently, where there was signal. I did have some problems at one point with the way they program the phone to prefer a low-signal AWE (or one of their partner's networks) to one that had enough signal to use, but they corrected that after I complained enough. I can't say the same thing about Sprint, or any of the GSM carriers. : :Bottom line, I like GSM for being the lesser evil. Another reason that GSM wasn't widely adopted in the US is that the original version was designed for a set of frequencies assigned to the US military. Protecting the European infrastructure manufactures is one of the reasons that's been suggested for this. In any event, the US standards are of higher quality than GSM. They've better voice quality, and make better use of the RF bandwidth. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message