Voicestream has recently come to Maine - woohoo.  They claim to cover
Portland but not North.  Web search and email inquiry hasn't given me
more details yet, over a week ago in spite of the autoresponse saying
I'd get a real response in 4 days.  I want a but more detailed info on
what's covered and their plan to extend coverage before signing up.
I've been with AT&T Wireless for a couple years and am looking forward
to that telco heavyweight to roll out their US GSM coverage.  They
have Washington state and say they'll have 40% of US by end of 2001
and the rest by end of 2002 but I haven't seen a printed timetable.
They'll quickly lap Voicestream in GSM coverage areas I suspect.

I want GSM for those occasional overseas travels and because they have
higher (than digital phone technologies like TDMA) data transfer
rates. iirc 9600 baud, oooh.  Brings back nostalgic memories of
overnight dowloads of a couple meg file.  GSM as a technology will
supposedly be capable of higher transfer rates in the near term.

Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]> writes:

> On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 05:38:33PM -0400, Ian B. Jacobs wrote:
> > Gerald Oskoboiny wrote:
> > > I bought a European cell phone yesterday (a Nokia 3310, almost
> > > identical to my 3390 except it supports European GSM network
> > > frequencies and has a few menu changes), so I am reachable at
> > > my usual phone number, and mail to gerald.pager works too.
> >
> > Can you explain why you choose this phone?
>
> I got it because I like Nokia phones in general (great UIs imho),
> and this one is small, cheap, and full of features. More notes:
> http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/07/ottawa/cell-phones.html

I've spent a little time looking at models and so far only have seen
Motorola P7389 as a reasonably priced tri-band GSM phone.  I'd rather
have a Nokia (or perhaps a couple for the different bands) after your
rating, seeing you send sms messages quick with it's autocomplete
dictionary, and they do look cooler.  I'm keeping an eye on [1] which
is kept fairly up2date on gsm phones that work well with linux when
looking at phones.

> > I stopped into
> > Sprint today to see what phones are available, but I left
> > without picking one. I was impressed by DanC's wireless
> > palm->nokia->web connection.
>
> I'd like to hook mine up to my laptop sometime, but haven't
> started researching that stuff yet.

I never got into Palm Pilots and want to do laptop->irda->gsm->web
dialup - I already can dialup my home machine over a land line with
vgetty [2], even dial back with a different login to reverse the toll
charges and can use caller ID so only I could dialup from my GSM
number, when I get one.  No need for a pay for dialup account.  There
are also some generous minute plans so as not to be concerned with the
cost of the call.  From Voicestream for instance 600 minutes/month +
1000 minutes/month weekends from Northeastern US to NE US for $39
which covers most of my regular travels (4-5 hours/week unnetworked on a
bus).  I can get by with small downloads, email, irc and text browsing
the web at this lower bandwidth in exchange for mobility.

Some other linux gsm related links below.

1. http://www-old.physiol.usyd.edu.au/daved/linux/gsm-modem.html
2. http://www-internal.alphanet.ch/~schaefer/vgetty.html
3. http://packages.debian.org/testing/comm/gsm-utils.html
4. http://mobilix.org/phones_linux.html
5. http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Infrared-HOWTO/index.html

--
Ted Guild <[email protected]>
http://www.guilds.net