Monday, March 8, 2004
AT&T Wireless Replacing Phones Due To New GSM 850 Coverage
Posted by Janak Parekh in "ARTICLE" @ 07:00 AM
"Attention AT&T Wireless customers: your phone is about to become obsolete. If you own one of the cellphones listed below and live in the New York metropolitan area, Northern New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Las Vegas, or Seattle, there’s a good chance that AT&T doesn’t want you to use it much longer."
Peter Rojas, in his new job at Engadget, has written up an excellent article summarizing AT&T's troubles in their network transition. First off, TDMA is slowly getting phased out of their network, so its coverage is likely to slowly shrink. Second, perhaps half of the GSM phones they've been selling all this time are not compatible with wide new swaths of their network, which run at 800MHz ("GSM 850"). This includes the Siemens SX56, the Sony Ericsson T68i, and even the Motorola MPx200 Smartphone. Therefore, at the current moment, Pocket PC Phone users and Smartphone users are out of luck -- they won't be able to access most of AT&T's new coverage. AT&T has a handset trading program, but the replacements seem to be strictly average at best. Nice going, AT&T. :?
Worse, I don't know of a Pocket PC Phone that even supports GSM 850 right now. :| The Motorola MPx is eventually supposed to be available in two versions: an 800/1800/1900 (supporting GSM 850) and a 900/1800/1900 (supporting European bands), and the rumored iPAQ 6000 series might have quadband (800/900/1800/1900), but I've heard no official confirmation on that. What I really want to know is why carriers and handset manufacturers can't get their act together and just make all of their phones quadband. :roll:
Peter Rojas, in his new job at Engadget, has written up an excellent article summarizing AT&T's troubles in their network transition. First off, TDMA is slowly getting phased out of their network, so its coverage is likely to slowly shrink. Second, perhaps half of the GSM phones they've been selling all this time are not compatible with wide new swaths of their network, which run at 800MHz ("GSM 850"). This includes the Siemens SX56, the Sony Ericsson T68i, and even the Motorola MPx200 Smartphone. Therefore, at the current moment, Pocket PC Phone users and Smartphone users are out of luck -- they won't be able to access most of AT&T's new coverage. AT&T has a handset trading program, but the replacements seem to be strictly average at best. Nice going, AT&T. :?
Worse, I don't know of a Pocket PC Phone that even supports GSM 850 right now. :| The Motorola MPx is eventually supposed to be available in two versions: an 800/1800/1900 (supporting GSM 850) and a 900/1800/1900 (supporting European bands), and the rumored iPAQ 6000 series might have quadband (800/900/1800/1900), but I've heard no official confirmation on that. What I really want to know is why carriers and handset manufacturers can't get their act together and just make all of their phones quadband. :roll:
