Ocean Navigator Communications Newsletter #16

The End of an Era: Choosing a New Cell Phone

There comes a time every few years when I must say goodbye to a trusted friend: A friend who goes with me almost everywhere, and remains reliable despite being frequently left behind. A friend I've dropped, abused and forgotten. Yes, it's time to replace my cell phone. Though this happens every few years, I look forward to it about as much as I do seeing the dentist -- a necessary evil. In fact, the dentist is usually far less painful -- I know I can budget about 45 minutes for that. But the cell phone... The problem is that I'm too curious to simply find a good phone, a good plan and then rush out and order it. First, I've got to look at all the alternatives, explore all the possibilities and calculate which plan will work best for me and my needs. This time, I figured there a few thousand friends who might also be interested in what I'm finding, so I'm sharing my research through this newsletter.

What initiated the search for a new phone wasn't the death of my old phone through a traumatic fall from a great height, nor did it fall overboard or get lost. There are three reasons I'm looking to replace it: First, the battery is old and weary. After about three years, my lithium-ion battery simply doesn't hold a charge as long as it used to. Now that it's dipping below 24 hours of standby, I've frequently been missing important phone calls due to a dead battery. Sure I could replace the battery, but SprintPCS no longer carries accessories for my Sanyo SCP 3000 phone. I could get one from one of several cell-phone accessory shops, but this would cost about $50. When compared with the price of a new phone, it hardly seems worth it.

The second reason behind my search for a replacement is my ego. Size matters, and mine's too big. It doesn't fit comfortably into the pocket of my blue jeans and won't even come close to living in a shirt pocket. The derisive laughter from my technophile friends is finally getting to me. You should see what they say when I whip out my bulky Globalstar satellite phone! Sooner or later, you'll be able to make a call on a business card from your wallet, but I'd settle for a compact cell phone.

The final reason for searching out a replacement is that I can't connect to the Internet using my phone. I've had the "pleasure" of testing quite a few of the data networks and traveled enough to realize that I have a genuine need to be able to read emails while away from a landline. Within the past few months, many more options have become available for connecting to the Internet at reasonable speeds.

So over the next couple of weeks, I'll take a look at Verizon's Express network, SprintPCS's Vision, AT&T's GSM/GPRS network, along with their older PocketNet service, Cingular's Wireless Internet Express. Maybe we'll throw in Voicestream and Nextel for good measure. And to make it even more interesting -- keep in mind that I'm trying to get service in Maine, which is often not on the coverage map for providers claiming to offer "the only true nationwide network." Nationwide -- except for Maine.

I'll start this week with a bit of a primer of some of the basic technology involved. In the beginning, there was analog mobile phone service (AMPS). This is still around, and in some remote areas (e.g., northern Maine) is still the only technology available to make a wireless phone call. Then things got ugly -- digital technologies became available, and we made a mess of them. Our European cousins picked one digital mode, the global system for mobile communications (GSM), and deployed it everywhere. Here in the United States, competition led to the parallel development of several different and incompatible networks. AT&T developed a digital network based on a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme, while SprintPCS and others pursued a technology called code division multiple access, which was developed largely by Qualcomm. A small minority of mobile-phone companies emulated the European deployment and began to create GSM networks here in the States. Those companies today are part of Voicestream. The only other significant outlier is Nextel, which uses the integrated digital enhanced network (iDEN).

This much-abbreviated history brings us through the first-generation analog network to the second-generation digital networks and on to today's third-generation initiatives and some second-and-a-half-generation gap fillers. When I discuss the different providers and their options, it will be useful to have this background, as it will give some idea of which networks are likely to interoperate.

Stay tuned for the next issue and more info...

- Dan Piltch
dpiltch@MarineComputer.com