Tweets for Today

[strredwolf]

• 06:25 #MTAMD Light Rail now stops at North Avenue, due to dwindling car supply. Expect shutdown of service soon! #
• 07:40 Gha! Bus canceled, can't make train! Kitteh late fer werk! #
• 08:35 Kitteh on LR, still runnin latez. #
• 10:19 Made it in 45 min late. #
• 19:42 Dear Sprint: Your phones don't work overseas. When are you going to join the rest of the world in using the GSM standard? #

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Comments

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

I suspect they'll switch to GSM about the same time it stops interfering with things like computer speakers. ;)

[bibliophage.livejournal.com]

I don't believe that Verizon works outside of the US either. Supposedly it should work in Canada (with the international roaming option), but my parents had TERRIBLE luck with it.

Cricket won't work outside of the US. Neither will many of the 'pay by the minute' packages.

A better question is - "Since they FCC is busy stealing more bandwidth back from the public to try to 'sell' for more money, why don't they mandate that the US companies use compatible technologies with Europe and Asia?"

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

Sprint uses a mix of CDMA and IDEN networks IIRC, Verizon and many other tiny carriers use CDMA. Only T-Mobile and Cingular/AT&T use GSM, I believe, at least locally to me. Most of them have invested a great deal in their networks and it would be a huge undertaking to switch all at once. The only way it would happen is if they had a genuine benefit from switching and had the capability to do dual-band phones for a period of time.

The fact of the matter is that GSM/G3 are inferior to CDMA/1X, so it'll be hard to convince Verizon to switch. Sprint I haven't done enough research on to see if IDEN is inferior or superior. I do know that IDEN is heavily used in latin america, to the point where Sprint was thinking of splitting its IDEN network off to sell to a mexican carrier.

Honestly, you'd be better off buying a throwaway phone in most places in the world. They're probably cheaper to buy a throwaway local phone with a local phone card than to buy a dual-band phone that would handle both networks.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

Verizon Mobile has chosen the LTE standard for 4G service, same for AT&T (T-Mobile I think is lagging), so it'll switch to GSM in a few years. They'll switch to match their European parent Vodaphone (which all of Europe is GSM/HSDPA already).

Which means short of some pain, Sprint will have CDMA/IDEN and WiMAX for it's 4G network -- which is already up in Baltimore and getting, what, DSL speeds?

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

Here's another painful one.

The prepaid phones, and even most non-prepaid GSM phones sold in the US will not properly work overseas. Sometimes they'll "work" through expensive roaming and other nonsense like that, but if you wanted to buy a local phone card and drop it into your phone it will fail, because the phones are almost always carrier-locked in the US. Most of the time, in foreign countries they rarely have the kind of phone plans that we have, instead utilizing prepaid cards heavily.

Yet another reason to buy a throwaway local phone.

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

Solution:

I just saw someone with a Sprint Blackberry... World Edition. It's a dual tuner thing with sprint's network and with GSM as well for use in other countries.