Telecom Roaming in Australia

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cellulargeek

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# 107149 28-Jan-2008 11:08

I have experienced loan phones on four different occasions in my travels to South America, UK and Europe. Mostly the standard was well below that of my Treo that I was using at the time.

Worldmode phones are good but for me at present the selection is just way too small, espcially when I can just go to Voda, pick any one of the phones and roam freely and widely.

Not to bag Telecom too much here though, one thing to remember is that Telecom were forced into CDMA by the gummit all those years ago, now its the company, it's employees and customers that are left paying the price.

CDMA is a far better technology than GSM in my opionin, power usage and output is lower (i.e. dosn't fry your brain as much), coverage is more reliable in fringe areas (which working in Agri-Tech means a lot to me!!) data pings and packet losses are lower (all be it only by a smidge) but it's like the old VHS vs BETA scenario, VHS was a crap technolgy, they just had a better marketing department!!!

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# 107150 28-Jan-2008 11:10

Again, perhaps you should check out the newer ones as they are almost certainly a lot better.

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sbiddle

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# 107151 28-Jan-2008 11:15

cellulargeek: one thing to remember is that Telecom were forced into CDMA by the gummit all those years ago, now its the company, it's employees and customers that are left paying the price.

???

Telecom were forced down the CDMA path back in ~1992 when they were forced to choose between their recently acquired AMPS B band and the TACS band as there were anti competition issues raised. Since Telecom was being run very much by the Americans they saw the future in DAMPS (and the CDMA standard that was being talked about at that stage) and not GSM (which was still very much a new standard).

The government had nothing to do with it. As the years moved on Telecom simply couldn't go GSM because they didn't own any spectrum to roll out a GSM network. They could have rolled out a 1800MHz GSM network circa 2000 if they had wanted to but chose to go down the CDMA route instead. IMHO it was a very wise move as their capital investment they have spent on CDMA vs what they would have spent making the move to GSM would have left them with a huge headache and you could argue they would have had a similair market share as they have now anyway.

CDMA is a far better technology than GSM in my opionin, power usage and output is lower (i.e. dosn't fry your brain as much), coverage is more reliable in fringe areas (which working in Agri-Tech means a lot to me!!) data pings and packet losses are lower (all be it only by a smidge) but it's like the old VHS vs BETA scenario, VHS was a crap technolgy, they just had a better marketing department!!!

I don't think there is anyway to compare both battles. GSM and CDMA both offer significant advantages and downfalls in many areas. VHS and Beta both had significant technical advantages and disadvantages over each other. GSM didn't win because of it's marketing, it won because it delivered a product into the martetplace well before CDMA was commercially available and was never usable at 900MHz which is what all of Europe was using for their TACS networks.

bbman

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# 107484 29-Jan-2008 22:45

cellulargeek: I'll bet ya TCNZ are loosing corporate customers in droves to Voda at the moment!!!

Hardly!!!

Makes no sense when in 3 months there will be 2-3 worldmode devices and in 8 or 9 months GSM 850 will be launched.

By the way, the US is a large roaming destination for Kiwis and CDMA has a huge foot print advantage over GSM with 850 / 1900 networks available to choose from, in fact most of North America is the same. With a World mode, Samsung W531 you have 850mhz CDMA 900GSM / 1800 mhz GSM - the new world mode coming soon has 850/1900CDMA and 900/1800mhz GSM pkus GPRS and EVDO rev0.

To spell it out, a world mode CDMA/GSM phone with Telecoms new CSL roaming package gives you more countries to roam to with a greater foot print than Vodafone becuase you get CDMA and GSM, so apart from limited handset choice why else would you choose vodafone with what is the 08 pipeline.

I agree the range is limited but once the Black jack, mondo and Blackberry are available Telecom corps will have the best of both worlds plus with a new GSM network coming with a lower freq (likely improvement on 900Mhz GSM for site to site coverage) Telecom customers will have a huge choice.

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