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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (18359)	7/15/2010 10:59:35 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

OT: I'm a M.Sc. with speciality in telecommunications, radar and IT and have worked at Brüel & Kjær Telecom Audio, at that time the internationally leading provider of audio test equipment for telephones :-) They still make the equipment that helps companies like Harley Davidson give their bikes that great sound, and they also do some things in health care equipment. In short, NMT was a nordic mobile telephone system, where the standards included interfaces between various parts of the provider equipment, making it possible to combine equipment from various vendors, so that smaller companies could compete so that prices got low. Mobile phone adoption in the NMT area (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland) was huge. Other European countries used other standards. One of the biggest telco companies internationally at that time was the Swedish Ericsson, but Nokia profited a lot from the NMT system, too. When GSM (french shortcut!) was designed, the NMT principles were adopted, which generated a lot of interoperability test that made some people call GSM the "Great Software Monster" - some complained that this was simply too complex, making so many vendors cooperate like this - but it worked. Besides the separation of various parts in the provider's server room, it also separated the phone vendor from the mobile phone service provider using SIM cards. SMS was part of it from the beginning, so Europe got used to SMSing (Texting) from the early 1990s. As GSM grew up, it was extended with GPRS for data, EDGE for more data speed, and finally UMTS (3G) for parallel data+voice and more speed. It took some time before USA adopted the European GSM standards family, too, but it seems that USA is embracing and adopting these European technologies, too. Even the Apple iPad uses a GSM SIM-card. I'm not really sure when Europe stopped using analog phones, but I guess that the advent of the legendary Nokia 2110 in 1994, with a user interface designed in Denmark, was the final death to analog phones and the start of the SMS/texting revolution.