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Even New York think they are behind the times....

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  • 03-08-2005 11:33pm
    #1
    dub45
    Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 12,448 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    Interesting article.


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    #2
    Solair
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,230 ✭✭✭Solair


    I've tried to get DSL in Boston and had similar problems to the nighmarish stuff you hear happening with eircom. The lines in our apartment building (the internal wiring) couldn't handle DSL at all. So, we had to do a lot of pushing to get Verizon to sort it all out and run new lines in from outside directly into the apartments (cost quite a bit!)

    On the mobile phone front, the US networks are absolutely terrible by comparison to anything in Europe. Coverage is a joke, even in built up areas. You hear excuses like America's much bigger than any european country so of course it's more difficult to cover, however when you consider that Europe's pretty much got perfect coverage from the EU's borders with Russia on the east to Galway in the extreme west that excuse doesn't really make a lot of sense. I couldn't get T-Mobile or Cingular coverage 10 miles outside Boston half the time. Coverage in buildings was woeful at best. There are at least 4 completely incompatable digital standards in use simultaniously (GSM, CDMA, iDEN and TDMA) making national roaming painful at best. If you change network you've usually got to ditch your handset. There are still signifigant areas of the country with *ONLY* analogue coverage. So, if you regularly go outside of the more built up areas you need to either have 2 handsets (digital and analogue) or a hybrid handset that's capable of handling a digital standard + analogue when there's no digital coverage available. Basically, it's a complete mess.
    3G services are starting to roll out, but almost exclusively in the major cities as an add-on to exsisting CDMA or GSM carriers services. I can't really see 3G going nationwide anytime remotely soon. At least, not until 2G gets rolled out first!

    To make matters worse, most networks' plans charge you for all incomming calls on the same basis as outgoing calls AND for incomming SMS messages!!!


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