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| Joel Kolstad wrote:
> My mother spends most of her time in New Zealand these days. She has one of
> the Sprint/Samsung CDMA/GSM phones (SCH-A790), which shes uses with a pre-paid
> Vodafone SIM in NZ. Interestingly, the phone will roam in CDMA mode on
> Telecom NZ's network... but the rates are outrageous, and you say.
Yeah, if you're interested in the most international roaming, without
prepaid SIMs but willing to pay the high roaming charges, then the
CDMA/GSM phones are definitely the best choice. Not only can you roam in
countries with no GSM at all, such as South Korea, but you can roam onto
both GSM and CDMA networks in countries that have both. This advantage
is increasing as CDMA networks in formerly GSM-only countries are being
greatly expanded. Alas, some of the new CDMA networks coming on-line
soon will be 450 MHz. It never ends.
I keep an unlocked 900/1800 GSM phone for use with prepaid SIMs in
Europe in parts of Asia. I have a lot of colleagues that tried to use
Cingular GSM with a tri-band 900/1800/1900 phone, back when Cingular was
1900 MHz only GSM in the west (and the rest of Cingular was TDMA), and
they gave up because the GSM coverage in the western region was
terrible, and the GSM roaming onto Voicestream (now T-Mobile) in the
rest of the country was expensive. Some of them have switched back to
Cingular now, using a quad-band phone, as the coverage is much improved
ever since the 800 MHz GSM deployment.
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