why do cel phone companies get rid of what works?

Post Reply New Topic

A few years ago, we were getting totally fed up with the crappy performance of our Sprint CDMA phones. Our calls were constantly getting dropped, and we had poor signal quality in even the most obvious areas that should have signal. Even when we had all the bars lit up, they still sounded terrible. As a desparate act to keep our business, our Sprint rep got us all set up with Nextel iDEN phones. They have been totally awesome. The phones don't drop calls, and the audio quality is quite nice...no asking people to repeat themselves, no dead zones in populated areas...they just work!

The nice thing about iden phones themselves is that most of them don't have stuid frilly features like CDMA phones have like games and dumb ring tones, but instead are designed to actually give good performance, like long battery life, and take drops from hand-height. You can't forget the cool walkie-talkie feature too that's great for businesses.

Well, I recently read than in 2009 that Sprint is shutting down the iDEN system for civillian use and will only be operating the system for government use. That means we'll be back to using those crappy CDMA phones again AAARGH!! !

The same issue applied a while back when the phase-out of analogue cell phones began. Analogue phones worked in some of the most remote areas. If you are even lucky to get a cell phone these days with analogue capability, it's usually an afterthough, sort of like the A.M. radio on a nice HiFi stereo system, and doesn't perform anywhere near as good as it used to. It's almost like the phone companys were purposefully making analoge cell phones perform poorly to get people into the flakey digital ones.

To make even smaller phone's you can't even dial on , don't know about if they done the sorting out of digi Arial transmitters doing bad in bad weather there..

It's a vast Globalist conspiracy.

McCoy: They probably redesigned the whole sickbay, too! I know engineers, they LOVE to change things.

CDMA is less likely to drop calls than TDMA and games don't have anything to do with CDMA.

TDMA (what your new phones actually are) actually do a worse job switching over when you move between cells and that means its more likely to drop than CDMA. So it's probably just that the TDMA network is more pervasive in your area, not that CDMA sucks.

In fact, TDMA is inferior to both GSM and CDMA.

New cellphone=more profits What you sould be able to do is buy airtime apart from the phone. That is what you are buying the right to use their rf voice network based on time used. The air time/hardware lockin needs to be stopped and the whole lot sould focus on getting more towers and stop trying to control what ppl use to connect to the towers.

I recall a ruling from the Librarian of Congress (USA) a couple of weeks ago that said that the 'software lock' on cell phones that ties them to providers can be cracked without violating the DMCA, as long as the contract period on the phone has expired.

Also, IIRC, GSM phones are not tied to service providers, their 'service' is provided through a separate standardized software card that is inserted into the phone.

As for analog cell service, there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the more remote areas (ie, ranch country) because of the FCC wanting those analog channels back for reassignment.

OTOH, I do agree that it is a royal pain in the you-know-what for companies to drop products that are clearly superior to everything else on the market. For example, I wish that Motorola was still making up-to-date versions of their V60 series cell phones. Not a lot of frills (monochrome screens are fine for me), but very compact, durable, good solid feel, excellent range and sound quality and they just plain work.

Mike

Erm, didn't CDMA get dropped by most UK mobile phones years ago? I'm pretty sure mine is just GSM... Sorry for being a bother..

No, CDMA is a new technology that Britain has refused to adopt because it would cost too much money to do so. The cost outweighs the benefit for the big telephone companies.

Intrugeing... (sorry for my spelling - I have no spell check on this computer...)

Although not completely relevent to the thread -- I just read an article on Apple's possible upcoming shake-up of the mobile world... here.

CDMA, to the best of my knowledge was never used on a public basis in the UK, its all been GSM for 2G and nowadays for 3G networks, WCDMA.

In the UK there are in general four GSM networks; Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile (yep, same company as that in the USA). As a rule of thumb, coverage for all four networks serves almost all of the UK except places like the Welsh and Scottish highlands where sheep outnumber humans 1000-1.

For Pre-pay or Pay As You Go, nearly all phones sold are locked to the network, meaning that they will only accept SIM cards from their own network. For a time at least, Vodafone had an even stricter lock on theirs. For contract or post-pay, Orange and T-Mobile lock their handsets but usually Vodafone and O2 don't. Removing the network lock so that the phone can be used with a SIM card on any network (referred to over here as unlocking) can either be got from the the network provider or can be calculated.

Because of the geography of the UK, cells that need to cover a large radius aren't important. Where I live, which everyone would describe as rural, Vodafone and O2 are very good signalwise, Orange are OK, but T-Mobile could be better.

Well allthough it is locked I had my phone hacked to accept all sim cards... O2 wanted 15 pound to unlock it... I payed 130 for the phone not paying them for unlocking the phone i payed for..