I've Bought Iphone and it’s fantastic |
I bought and it’s fantastic. It’s a major step in the next generation of phones. Anyone who bets against Apple must have ” Irocks” for brains.Jobs has done it again,bravo!! The reason the US is behind the ball when it comes to 3G/HSPDA roll out has been entirely down to the FCC who, yet again, failed to plan the spectrum needed for 3G roll out. Their initial idea was to squish ‘3GSM’ (UMTS) into the same 1900mhz spectrum used by the existing 2G CDMA and GSM carriers. It would never have worked.
European 3G’s been quite a long time in the planning process and the spectrum was ring fenced for it years ago. ‘3GSM’ phones operate on 2100Mhz downlink + 1900 mhz uplink. The US has this at the moment: If the mobile network in the US could have, believe me they would have rolled out 3GSM/UMTS nationally in the same kind of time frame as their European counterparts. It’s nothing to do with lack of demand, technological differences or market differences. It’s simply a case that the FCC didn’t do its job properly. There was a similar mess with the roll out of digital mobile phones in the first place too! It would make sense for Apple to avoid 3G in the US for the timebeing until the FCC and the network operators come to some kind of sensible agreement on spectrum planning. The current system would simply mean the phones are going to have to support way more frequencies than they should need to. In Europe 3G service is an ‘add on’ pretty much. 3GSM / UMTS is fully backwards compatable with 2.5G ‘traditional GSM’. So, basically if you’re in a 3G coverage area you have massively fast data transfer rates as well as all your normal voice/text services and if you’re not in a 3G area, you’ll fall back onto your carrier’s normal 2.5G GSM/EDGE/GPRS network and will just have voice/text and slower data services. It’s all very seamless. They will have to provide a user-accessible SIM card as it’s legally required to have such a setup within the EU to allow customers to switch carrier and keep the handset once the network’s subsidy has been paid off. Also, they’ll have to go with multiple carriers in Europe as even the very biggest networks like Vodafone, Orange, O2/Movistar and T-Mobile are not in absolutely every country. I’d say they’ll have to do quite a few deals to get into all of their European iTunes markets. You can be sure though that the networks will want to get onto the marketing hype bandwagon that is iPhone though. It should be interesting to see who gets it. The technology isn’t too unique anyway as AT&T (Cingular) is simply a GSM network. I can’t imagine they’ll have any issues rolling out visual voicemail etc etc on other GSM / 3GSM platforms in Europe and elsewhere. So my advice is that once its out here (in Europe) the americans can get an iPhone here and use Verizon in US |