stimpy

Scott is right. TDMA customers were given a special SIM that was hosted by British Telecom's Cellnet. Remember that AT&T and BT used to be partners (sort of). But now if you have AT&T GSM in the states, your U.S. SIM can be inserted in any GSM phone in the world and work fine. BT is not involved with those calls. Yet AT&T still charges ridiculous rates for international roamed calls.

Does anyone know what companies such as BT, FT, or Vodaphone charge when you roam to the U.S. or around the continent? I may switch to a Euro carrier.

NickP 1K

For me at least GSM ATT coverage is better than the always busy TDMA network... Sure TDMA coverage as far as signal strength was better, but rarely was I ever to use it due to network busy's....

As new TDMA sites are no longer being put in place, the TDMA network will stay where it is... The GSM network and Analog roaming partners moving to GSM will make things better down the road... Still some pain over the next few year though.

cordelli

I just switched to a phone that offers GSM/Digital/Analog with AT&T and have been thrilled with the coverage it offers (OK, I didn't plan on it, somebody stole my old phone at JFK). I live in Connecticut, work in New York, and last week was on a trip to Dallas (stopovers in Atlanta) and spent the weekend driving up to Maine and back. There was GSM in places I never expected to see it, and there is GSM coverage in places I could never have used the telephone before. In the two weeks or so I've had the phone, I've probably been in GSM areas 75% or more or the time.

It's not a triband GSM phone I can take overseas, I have another phone for that, I wanted the non GSM digital and Analog coverage instead.

Get a phone that does both (or all three bands) and you will have GSM when you are in the coverage area, and when not in the area then the usual digital.

The GSM is siginficantly better at things like train tunnels and subway platforms then other signals were.

There are some issues with the impoementation of AT&T, for example messages are not delivered unless you are in GSM coverage, and calls get dropped when you go from GSM to digital or analog, but neither is an issue at all for me, most of my calls are very short, and I've not had a problem with messages yet.

[This message has been edited by cordelli (edited 09-01-2003).]

alanw

I'm paying 64 Euro cents/minute right now to roam in the US with Vodafone Spain. That covers incoming calls from anywhere and in-US calls. Calls to Spain are billed at .64 plus tolls (don't know what those are yet).



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-alan in sitges, home of Si-Do

winkydink

From the IEC: http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/tdma/

excerpt:
Because of its adoption by the European standard GSM, the Japanese Digital Cellular (JDC), and North American Digital Cellular (NADC), TDMA and its variants are currently the technology of choice throughout the world. However, over the last few years, a debate has convulsed the wireless community over the respective merits of TDMA and CDMA.

NickP 1K

GSM is Time Divison, IT AINT Pure IS-41...

WCDMA is basically a GSM feature set utilizing CDMA; Code Division

stimpy

It seems there is some confusion between radio technologies and roaming/service technologies. TDMA and CDMA are radio technologies. IS-41, GSM, 3GPP, etc cover roaming, services, security, etc.