Behodar:

 

I believe the RCG sites are LTE-only.

 

@Behodar Many have 3G also on them

I just completed road trip to/from the Waikato over the past few days and noticed my One NZ connection hardly switched to 3G the whole way, almost like the power has been turned up?

CYaBro:

 

New business idea: Phone rental company for tourists.

 

This is not so new - I worked at a Vodafone store in Wellington in the very early 2000's and we regularly used to rent 1900 band Motorola handsets to people heading off to the USA and the like. 

And when I worked at Vodafone Sydney Airport around 2006/2007 we rented a lot of Aussie handsets to mainly incoming American tourists. 

I presume with the proliferation of tri-band handsets over the years since, renting handsets has all but died out, but I guess it could make a comeback...

I remember working at Telecom in the late 90s and they had a team entirely dedicated to sending out phones for roaming as the old 025 phones didn't work in a lot of places people were travelling to.

From memory it was all Bellsouth/Vodafone phones that were being couriered out.

In quite a few parts of the north shore of Auckland i regularly get dropped to 3G on Spark's network.

ascroft: Yeah they backed the wrong horse with cdma rather than gsm locally…

Kinda like Betamax.

I vaguely recall something about GSM not being readily available at 850 MHz at the time. There was nothing really "wrong" with CDMA, it just didn't take off.

openmedia:

 

In quite a few parts of the north shore of Auckland i regularly get dropped to 3G on Spark's network.

 

Not just Auckland. In Whakatane, outside, my phone will flip between 3G/4G/5G at "random".

Behodar:

 

ascroft: Yeah they backed the wrong horse with cdma rather than gsm locally…

Kinda like Betamax.

 

I vaguely recall something about GSM not being readily available at 850 MHz at the time. There was nothing really "wrong" with CDMA, it just didn't take off.

 

In Theresa Gattung's book she mentions something about Telecom having to use CDMA as (apparently) the government told her the country couldn't have two GSM networks running side-by-side...or something.

Found the relevant passage:

In terms of mobile phones, we desperately needed to move from the 025 network, with its very limited capabilities. All over the world analogue networks, including the world’s biggest, AT& T, were being phased out and handsets were no longer being produced. As nothing about technology stands still, we believed it was very important to get a third-generation product to market at speed. We knew there would be a choice of paths to whatever the next-generation technology was: we went with CDMA mobile technology for our network, partly because CDMA was the major technology used for mobile communications in North America, including by one of our then owners, Bell Atlantic, and it was popular throughout Asia, but also because we did not have a licence for GSM, which had a higher number of subscribers worldwide. (In fact, Telecom originally did have a licence for GSM some years before I joined, as did Bell South, which was later bought by Vodafone. I understood from Roderick [Deane, former Telecom CEO] that the government had required Telecom to sell its licence due to the view that it wouldn’t be good for competition for the two main players to be on the same technology.)

If this was indeed the case it sounds patently ridiculous IMO, especially given the fact that today we have (at least) two networks who operate exactly like that.

But that was a long time ago, and (as has been pointed out already) things have changed quite a bit since then.

@MadEngineer

Yes still using GSM for voice and text and signal is a lot stronger than 3G.

openmedia:

 

In quite a few parts of the north shore of Auckland i regularly get dropped to 3G on Spark's network.

 

@openmedia This proves the 3G / WCDMA network shutdown can't come fast enough!

Linux:

 

openmedia:

 

In quite a few parts of the north shore of Auckland i regularly get dropped to 3G on Spark's network.

 

 

@openmedia This proves the 3G / WCDMA network shutdown can't come fast enough!

 

And why incompatible handsets need to go

I worked for Telecom at the time and we were told that  we couldn't use the same technology as the competition  (Bellsouth) hence they went  CDMA  which was a good technology with a far  longer basestation range speech  technology  than GSM at the time.  The same reason  is there for the choice of NEC central office switchers  rather than the better Northern Telecom systems  as Clear Communications used that  vendor. 

old3eyes:

 

I worked for Telecom at the time and we were told that  we couldn't use the same technology as the competition  (Bellsouth) hence they went  CDMA  which was a good technology with a far  longer basestation range speech  technology  than GSM at the time.  The same reason  is there for the choice of NEC central office switchers  rather than the better Northern Telecom systems  as Clear Communications used that  vendor. 

 

@old3eyes The issue was network vendors were not supporting 850Mhz GSM hardware. 850Mhz was CDMA at the time only but this changed soon after

Interesting video from Australia, some phones that support 4G VoLTE do not support emergency calls over the protocol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPlTz-3estM