You know what I would really like to see in US cell phone pricing? Tie minutes and texts together. You have 500 minutes say, every time you send a text, it costs you a minute. If you go over, it’s 10 cents a minute. The current situation is absurd because people are usually drowning in minutes and don’t have a text plan so theres a huge disincentive to text anything.
I would jump instantly to any network that offered me that sort of plan.
Martin Hyde is quite right about the differences in poulation distribution between the US and Australia presenting a false picture of the “efficiency” of the network. As Martini Enfield mentions the networks quote 97% coverage for the GSM network but a quick glance at the maps at gsmworld will show the differences is size of coverage.
Even 97% leaves about 700,000 Australians without coverage and in country areas, even decent size towns, CDMA is usually all that works, however the CDMA networks are being shutdown.
As two off the cuff examples of Australian coverage:
last week I attended a party at a pub about 10 kms from Newcastle (population 150,000) and roughly the same distance from Williamtown (Australia’s major airforce base). You could only get the vaguest signal by standing in one corner of the car park. It was like watching animals migrate as people pulling out phones to check on kids or call friends headed for the car park.
My sister-in-law ran a country school about 20kms from Canberra (the national Capital). The signal strength is so low in the town that her battery used to go flat every day as the phone searched for a signal.
So yeah you don’t have to go far from the beaten track in Australia to get coverage equivalent to that in the Simpson Desert.
GSM is more than just a European standard, it’s the primary standard in China which is the world’s largest cell phone market.
Furthermore, I really don’t see it as a “dominant position to lose.” Europe is in a good position because its governments helped push forward a universal standard. The FCC in the United States did not do so, resulting in competing standards. If European governments properly change the standard to CDMA (which is universally viewed as a superior technology) then Europe could easily end up better off than the United States because we still do not have one standard, in fact, the outdated GSM is actually growing in popularity here, I think.
In any discussion about Mexico, I’d have to discount the poor, because there are so many of them that that they screw up the numbers. So amongst the middle class and above, it certainly looks like cell phone use is much more prevalent than in both the United States and Canada. In Mexico, there’s only one monopoly phone company (TelMex) that’s controlled by the federal government. It’s slow to action, overpriced, and inefficient. Cellular phones, though, are free market, and there’s a lot of competition and it’s just as cheap as American cell phone plans.
One major difference, though, is that “caller pays” when calling a cell phone. The way the government chose to implement this is by using a special calling code when calling a cellular phone, so you’ve got to know that a cell phone is cellular when calling it from a land line or (now) from out of the country, which kind of makes the system disjointed compared to our virtually seamless US system.
Another thing that bugs me is that some of them (in my family, at that) is that they’re a lot more prone to use their annoying walkie-talkie features in public without trying to be discreet. Grrrr!
As for test messaging, I run in the same circles in Mexico as I do in the US, so I don’t know how much it’s used. If I miss the high use in the USA, then I certainly miss such use in Mexico.
This is the same for me in the Colorado Rockies. I never turn my cell on unless I’m calling out. Or in such circumstance that I know someone will be calling.
I always thought that the battery dieing in 8 hours or so was the norm.
Recently, my Wife ran an Iron Man in Las Vegas. It was quite novel to actually leave my cell phone on all day, and actually receive calls.
I live a similar distance from a similar-size town, and have similar coverage. It also hasn’t stopped Britain’s market for mobiles. So can we please drop the ‘coverage’ explanation?
This, I don’t get. My phone can be in and out of a very faint signal for days and still have power.
On my work-issued cell phone, I only have to be within my facility 50 to 100 feet before I lose a signal. If I’m there for more than a couple of hours, the battery will run down as the phone constantly tries to search fruitlessly for a tower. Before we (Americans) all got smart and turned off the instant-connect (whatever the hell the walkie-talkie function is called), the phones would die in a day as the phone tried to look for whatever signal on the tower makes that function work.
As far as the phone losing charge searching for the network I only know about it from my own experience. While I was with Orange my fully charged phone went flat overnight on my bedside table. The next day I dropped in to an Orange dealer to buy a replacement battery. The young guy there told me I didn’t need one because the local network had crashed overnight and LG and some Nokia phones run the battery flat trying to find a connection. It is like pinging a remote URL every milli-second on your PC.
Most phones don’t do it but like me my sister-in-law had an LG.
No, because in the U.S., coverage sucks in the cities. You tend to lose signal when you enter a building or an elevator or turn the corner or drive under a tree.
You need to switch providers. I don’t have these problems.
Who’s your provider? I’ve had the same problems with AT&T and Verizon.
When you lose your signal inside a building, it’s usually because the building has a lot of metal in it. Metal studs, iron girders, or steel rebar in the concrete can have the effect of turning a building into a big Faraday cage, blocking radio waves from getting in or out. Sometimes they’ll put cellular repeaters in a building to compensate for this, but that’s up to the building’s owners. (I think there’s one in my local mall. I get killer reception in the central court.) In any event, there’s not a lot that any cellular provider can do about this. It’s just the way buildings are built.
If your cell phone is losing reception every time you go under a tree, then you just have a really crappy service. I have Cingular, and I’ve lost maybe one call in the last few years.
Yes, like our British train network, eek
Verizon. I really don’t have problems with dropped calls in San Diego, I have not had problems in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, New York etc.
I don’t know what you are looking at, but the vast majority of phones here are less then $200. If you sign up for a new account, you can get phones for free.
There are some “Blackberry” types, but the vast majority of phones here are straight cell phones, not big clunkers. There are some really tiny ones as well.
The interface is much simplier in Japanese than in English. Some of my American friends and I text message in Japanese rather than in English because it’s much faster. The text messaging is one of the most convenient features, and I use it constantly. I have my staff text message me when I’m out of the office, since it won’t interupt meetings or put calls through when I’m on the train. They can send a customer’s phone number in the message, and just by clicking on that, I can dial the number.