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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric Dickson who wrote (6263)	7/31/1999 11:38:00 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Respond to of 29987

Eric, I don't have any direct experience with those phones, but here's a post from the Yahoo QCOM board that describes one user's experience: {} by: pppsnoop1 28685 of 28707 I'm in Italy largely because the Children's Chorus of Washington, a group I helped start, is performing in a choral music festival. In addition to keeping up with my E-mail, I'm also posting reports and pictures of performances to the Web site I maintain (www.childrenschorus.com). And I'm doing it all without connecting my computer to a phone line. SLOW GOING. For a long time, I had been hearing reports of how advanced wireless voice and data communication is in Europe. Now, mixing business and pleasure, I'm trying it myself. Bottom line: The glowing reports are true. You still need a sack of adapters to connect a modem to European phone lines, but a single cell phone works from Land's End to Vladivostok. And the right phone can double as a slow, but reliable, modem for a laptop or Windows CE handheld computer. The secret is Europe's unified Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a Continentwide digital network. Intelligent phones and extensive agreements among carriers make roaming seamless wherever GSM is used--and it is the standard nearly everywhere except in the Americas, for the most part, and in Japan. The U.S. has a national analog cell network. With a cellular-ready modem, you can connect to the Internet over an analog phone. But connections are slow and unreliable, so relatively few people try. A technology called Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) allows direct Internet connections over some analog systems, but it uses special radio modems rather than cell phones. The digital situation is far worse. While most of the world agreed on GSM, and Japan adopted its own PDC standard, the U.S. unwisely let cellular licensees pursue the technology of their choice. The result has been a digital disaster. Four different standards, including GSM, are in use in the U.S. A phone built for one system won't work on another. Even U.S. GSM is odd. It uses different frequencies than the rest of the world does, so only a few multi-frequency phones, such as the Ericsson I888 World that I'm using, work on both U.S. and international networks. None of the digital systems is available in all major cities, and coverage gets spotty even in outer suburban areas. Only GSM currently can handle data. Equipment maker Qualcomm Inc. and operators such as Sprint PCS Group are working to add data capacity to their networks, but it's a huge, and hugely expensive, job. In contrast to the spotty digital coverage in the U.S., I can use my phone for voice or data just about anywhere in Italy, including on inter-city trains. For now, GSM data transmission is limited to 9.6 kilobits per second, slow for Web browsing but quite acceptable for E-mail. Because my laptop controls the phone with an infrared link, all I have to do to make a data call is lay the handset down next to the computer and click a Windows dial-up networking icon. Thanks to an account with MCI WorldCom UUNET, I connect to the Internet through local access numbers in Europe. The only real problems have been caused by the flakiness of Windows 98's infrared link software and the occasional crashes it causes. Other phones connect to GSM-ready modems with special cables. My Ericsson phone also works with Windows CE handhelds, which provide a more robust infrared link. Roaming with a GSM phone in Europe is not cheap, but it beats the cost of calling from hotels. My phone was supplied by Omnipoint Communications Services, a provider of GSM service to the eastern and midwestern U.S. Calls in Italy and France cost 29 cents to 70 cents a minute; calls to the U.S. run 70 cents to $1.40 per minute. Popular as cell phones have become in the U.S., they are even more so in Europe, where everyone from gondoliers in Venice to nuns in the Vatican can be seen chatting away. And the technology is likely to advance faster here than in the U.S., with 115 kbps data service coming soon. For me, slow speeds aren't that much of a problem right now. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: 07/30/1999 11:26 pm EDT as a reply to: Msg 28683 by Punning_Linguist View Replies to this Message