Disqus - Latest Comments for Colin_Pye

Re: How location-based apps are dead in the water until someone fixes the extortionate rates of roaming charges

Colin_Pye — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:16:55 -0000

Don't forget about the joy of non-roaming within this country!

I'm near Halifax, in Nova Scotia. Let's say I go and visit a friend in Vancouver. If I call their cell from my cell, I pay for a local call. That's where the good news ends.

If they call me back, and I answer, they get billed for a long distance call to Halifax. To add insult to injury, I also get charged for a long distance call, from Halifax (where their call ended up) to my phone in Vancouver! If I don't answer, and it goes to voice mail, they still have long distance charges to Halifax, and I would get long distance charges to Halifax to pick up the voice mail.

There was a way around it, before the carriers decided to get rid of it. The person calling the phone from another area would dial a "roamer number", generally one of the local cellular exchanges, and 7626 (it spells out ROAM). You would get a second dial tone, where you dial the 10-digit phone number, and if the phone is in the local calling area, your call rings through to the cell phone, all at local non-long-distance calling rates. If you aren't in range, the call doesn't go through.

There was another side effect. If a friend from home had a great long-distance package, they could make a long-distance call to a roamer number where you were visiting, and you would just get charged your regular airtime charges, with the caller picking up any applicable long distance charges.

As my use of past tense suggests, the cell companies got rid of the roamer numbers, so that if I were in Vancouver, someone in the same room could call me, and the phone company would collect not one, but two long distance charges for a local call!

I recently had a call with a Customer Service person about just this sort of thing, and they just couldn't understand why one wouldn't be happy to pay two long-distance charges for a single local call. Their response was "We don't have roaming charges within Canada any more, so why should we have that roaming thing?" They also thought it was fair and just that if I called you, it would be a local call, but if you called me, we *BOTH* would have to pay long distance to the other side of the country, even if we were in the same room! I don't know where they find those rocket scientists/brain surgeons/other really smart people to fill their customer service positions.

Re: Telus and Bell to go GSM in 2010

Colin_Pye — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:44:32 -0000

Maybe my math is a little off, but how can you get more than 100% coverage?

If I have a cake, and you take 100% of it, then you have it all, there's no more to take!

Retarded indeed.

Re: Telus and Bell to go GSM in 2010

Colin_Pye — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:38:51 -0000

Let's see... back when everything was analog, GSM was supposed to give 3 calls in the same airspace that could handle 1 in AMPS. CDMA handled 10, compared to 1 in AMPS. So, the greatly inferior technology gets better than 3 times the capacity of the "superior" technology? Those 3.7 billion people are using the resources that could support over 12 BILLION people with CDMA technology. What happens in denser urban calling areas when Bell and Telus reduce their network capacity by 2/3?

Then there's the issue of handoffs, where your call is handled by one tower under GSM, while CDMA keeps your call suspended like a fly in a spider web, with up to 5 towers holding onto your call at the same time. If you are mountain climbing, which do you prefer, one safety line that isn't always connected, or up to 5, so that if one fails, there are others to support you?

Of course, in the end, the next version of GSM is being built on CDMA technology anyway, so it's a switch back to where you started from. And the RUIM (CDMA's SIM Card) will work in GSM phones too. Only thing, Telus, Bell, and friends haven't bothered to use RUIMs in Canada, even though they have sold some phones with the card space for years (The Nokia 6275i is just one example, although the carrier's programming disabled the slot, just like the carriers like to disable Bluetooth functionality.)