|
| Dick C wrote:
> The down side of getting data away from the city becomes a matter of
> signal strength. The farther away from a tower the lower the signal
> and after a point the speed degrades.
I was in Taipei last week. The coverage was incredibly good, both on
CDMA and GSM, both in the city and out in the mountains (where I
expected poor coverage based on the U.S. model of rural coverage). Since
all the carriers are island-wide, there are no "rural" carriers to pawn
off the hard to cover areas on.
The only problem was that it was incredibly hard to actually make or
receive a call at the trade show on my GSM phone with a prepaid SIM
card. My friend in Taiwan warned me that he wouldn't be able to call me,
and that I would have trouble using my phone, so I called him from one
of the two pay phones in the entire convention center that took coins.
This is a brand new convention center, and this was the first trade show
held there. It's rather sad that the carriers couldn't address the
capacity issue with more cells, but maybe they were already at the limit
for the area. How close together can the GSM cells be, and how many can
be in a small area to improve capacity?
The CDMA phone worked fine, but I wasn't willing to make many
$1.49/minute calls roaming with my Verizon phone! I'm sure the reason
that CDMA worked is because CDMA is pretty new in Taiwan and there
aren't a lot of subscribers on the CDMA system yet. I just noticed that
Verizon has lowered the roaming rate in Taiwan to $1.29/minute, but this
is still pretty outrageous.
|
|