[ale] Maemo 5

Greg Clifton gccfof5 at gmail.com
Sun Nov 28 12:10:28 EST 2010


I have looked into this issue a good bit and the current state of affairs is
that you have 4 technologies in use CDMA, GSM, Wimax and IDEN  and 4 top
tier carriers. Of those, Verizon and Sprint run CDMA, but by virtue of the
acquisition of Nextel, Sprint also runs IDEN but seems to be mostly pushing
that through their Boost Mobile subsidiarity (Southern Linc by The Southern
Co also uses IDEN). AT&T and T Mobile run GSM. Verizon has always had the
best coverage out in the boonies, but you pay for it in higher costs.
However in the relatively near future the situation will change,I think, for
the better.  Both Verizon and AT&T are switching to LTE which is like 50x
faster than EVDO (Verizon will be ahead of AT&T by a year or more in the
roll out). As I understand, LTE handsets will fall back to GSM as necessary
so worldwide portability should be possible with Verizon with a  year or
two. Sprint is running Wimax phones for g4 but not sure how they intend to
go forward. Why would they continue to support 3 different technologies?
Last I looked, T Mobile is doing some funky 3.5 technology instead of going
with a 4g technology like LTE. If LTE is all it is cracked up to be, it
seems they will be forced to switch too, but they would likely then be a few
years behind AT&T.
Then there are the 2nd tier companies that lease time from the big guys and
resell it. They seem mostly to run on the Sprint network (Virgin, Metro,
Boost), or Verizon (Page Plus) or AT&T.

GC


On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Mike Harrison <cluon at geeklabs.com> wrote:

> > Off the top of your head, is N900 able to work on Sprint - or would
> > I need to switch carriers?
>
> Last I checked.. Sprint is strictly CDMA ala Verizon.
>
> I travel outside the USA a lot,
> so GSM is a far superior option for me.
>
>
>
>
>
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