TechWeb: "GSM Based phones can usually be used in many non-U.S. countries."

decaturtxcowboy <nope_none_@nowayspam.com> wrote in news:XBVjh.41289
$wP1.32181@newssvr14.news.prodigy.net:

> Considering that Texas can overlay most of eastern Europe.
>
>

Americans' geography training is fun to play with. I lived and worked in
Iran for a little over 2 years back in the late 70's, leaving 28 days
before the Shahanshah fled the country. Most people I meet know there is
a country called Iran, but have an awful time placing it on a globe, even
"educated" people.

My favorite question to Americans is still:

"Compared to something in the United States, how big is Iran (in area)?"

Answers range from Rhode Island to California and Texas, usually, some
saying Alaska rarely....Some think it's a tiny island in the Arabian Gulf
like Bahrain.

A Bahraini blogger, Mahmood (http://mahmood.tv), shows us in the last few
days a huge pile of Iranian Rials his wife will be taking with her on a
trip from Bahrain to Iran, shortly. There's nearly 500,000 Rials. But,
he says he's not rich....that's only $US530. Other things have gotten
much bigger since I left in the late 70's, I see. Mahmood is a great fun
read. He owns Gulf Broadcast, a video production company. He just the
opposite of the bloodthirsty, Islamic terrorist America's Jewish TV wants
you to think about to keep the bankers' war machine running. His garden
is beautiful. His politics makes the king and religious zealots puke...
(c;

Just to put it on topic....Bahrain has GSM phones that work anywhere
Mahmood travels. Their phone system is German, the finest equipment oil
money can buy. I can call home from Bahrain's phones faster than I can
call home from Atlanta...direct satellite all the way. There are huge
satellite ground stations around the main telephone campus.

For entertainment value Larry, you are something...
Nothing like a good conspiracy theory rant to get a nice chuckle.

Now..... I sure hope it is only meant as entertainment.
Not to actually be taken seriously. That would be an entirely different story...

If one were to actually believe this craziness, one would most likely also
believe that ANY company in business, trying to make a profit and maximize
shareholder value is greedy and evil. That a company isn't entitled to make
a profit on the BILLIONS of dollars it spends?

This is simple capitalism vs communism.

You a commie Larry?


"Larry" <noone@home.com> wrote in message news:Xns98A49A3C3751Fnoonehomecom@208.49.80.253...
> "John Richards" <jr70@blackhole.invalid> wrote in news:f4Vjh.37257
> $wc5.21813@newssvr25.news.prodigy.net:
>
>> Not sure what you are getting at. There is plenty of competition in the
>> mobile communications market. In my city I can choose between Cingular,
>> Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and a few others.
>>
>>
>
> But, is that an illusion created for the consumers?
>
> They're all members of the same "club", the CTIA (www.ctia.org)....
> They all act, approximately, the same, arrogant, aloof, demanding...
> They all play the same contract games with subsidies to prevent churning...
>
> Are they REALLY competitors, or simply tentacles of the same octopus, like
> oil companies are, bankers are, broadcasters are, cable companies are, many
> other corporations are??
>
> If I want to steal your customers, I offer them something really grand,
> really cheap and, most of all, industry shaking. Cellphone companies never
> do this. They all make lots of noise in overpriced advertising, but they
> never, just like gas companies, get far afield of what their CTIA bretheren
> are doing.....price fixing.
>
> Yes, you can choose any CTIA member for your phone, just like you can
> choose any Federal Reserve banker to hold your money.....
>

"Larry" <noone@home.com> wrote in message news:Xns98A49A3C3751Fnoonehomecom@208.49.80.253...
>> There is plenty of competition in the
>> mobile communications market. In my city I can choose between Cingular,
>> Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and a few others.
>>
>>
>
> But, is that an illusion created for the consumers?
>
> They're all members of the same "club", the CTIA (www.ctia.org)....
> They all act, approximately, the same, arrogant, aloof, demanding...
> They all play the same contract games with subsidies to prevent churning...
>
> Are they REALLY competitors, or simply tentacles of the same octopus, like
> oil companies are, bankers are, broadcasters are, cable companies are, many
> other corporations are??
>
> If I want to steal your customers, I offer them something really grand,
> really cheap and, most of all, industry shaking. Cellphone companies never
> do this. They all make lots of noise in overpriced advertising, but they
> never, just like gas companies, get far afield of what their CTIA bretheren
> are doing.....price fixing.

Can a business afford to greatly undercut a competitor's prices if it means
losing money? Instead of imagining some grand conspiracy, could it be
that all the wireless companies have pretty much the same cost basis
and the same technological limits?

--
John Richards

"John Richards" <jr70@blackhole.invalid> wrote in
news:P7%jh.228$ji1.198@newssvr12.news.prodigy.net:

> Can a business afford to greatly undercut a competitor's prices if it
> means losing money? Instead of imagining some grand conspiracy, could
> it be that all the wireless companies have pretty much the same cost
> basis and the same technological limits?
>
> --
> John Richards
>
>

Ask WalMart. They do it every day and it takes EIGHT armored cars to
haul it off from the new Superstore near me. It almost fills the
truck...8 times a day!

Let's have a little check.....Go to:
http://www.ctia.org/research_statist....cfm/AID/10030
the cartel's own statistics.....

Click up the number of subscribers....219,420,467
Now, click up total revenue....$60,450,669,000.00 X 2 =
120,901,338,000.00
divided by 219,420,467 = $551.00 per sub. divided by 12 = $45.91/month.
The average local monthly bill = $49.30 on another page. Maybe that's
taxes and the other add-on loads bureaucrats have dreamed up.

$120B/year is an amazing total.

Divided by 197,576 cell towers = $611,923.20 per year revenue on EACH
tower. Not a bad return on investment, minus the downsized stores with
no chairs to sit on while you're waiting for service.

Now, how much are their POTS costs? It doesn't say. They don't have
"lines" into the cells, like the old telephone systems. The cell has a
microwave link and a data server someplace. Phone numbers are CHEAP!
Skype sells me an incoming telephone number for $28/year. I doubt that's
at cost, don't you? Interconnect must be even cheaper in the US and
Canada. Skype sells me outgoing service to POTS, an interconnect from
their system, for $15/year....truly unlimited service...no "airtime", no
time limits, no monthly fee. I can't believe Ebay is losing its ass
providing this next year, can you? There's gotta be a small profit in
it. Even if it were at cost, $43/year - $551 per sub is a reasonable
profit margin for any business. I wish mine were that much! I bet
$43/sub/year is double what it really costs. Of course, this is just a
guess.

We seem to average 322 minutes a month, if you divide the 850B+ airtime
minutes here by the 219,420,467 of us in June of 06. I'm about average
on that. Alarmingly, divided by the 197,576 towers you get 4,302,141
airtime minutes per cell average. Does anyone know what kind of average
loading this is and how close to capacity this average represents? Of
course, it means nothing because so many towers are along interstates and
virtually unloaded while other towers are located on Wall Street making a
"few more calls" per hour...(c;

My point is, they're not going broke at these prices.

Click up cell sites for fun.....
From Jun 05 to Jun 06, the GRAND TOTAL new cell sites for ALL carriers
across the entire country was a measily 19,551 new sites. I, personally,
think someone with revenues of $121,000,000,000.00 can afford to fill in
a few more holes than these, don't you?

Anyone that read this far without falling over asleep....think about
those numbers next time you can't make a phone call from your living
room....(c;

On Dec 24, 10:59 am, Larry <n...@home.com> wrote:
>
> > users in the U.S. alone.NTSC is the "installed base" of analog TV in the US as well

Other countries, as well, not just the US.

>....It's the
> worst TV system on the planet with only 525 lines vs 800 or more for
> everyone else.

PAL is 625@50Hz, and the jerkiness due to the low refresh rate is quite
apparent
during even modest motion.

> We've done it again, by the way! ATSC is the DTV system America has
> settled on. Compared to the European DTV standard, it sucks just as bad as
> NTSC but is cheaper to deploy and more profitable to sell....any questions?

What don't you like about 8VSB vs COFDM?

Remember, we have a huge area to cover, vs. most relatively small
European countries.

So, would you doom rural areas to have no TV at all, when their TV
stations have huge
areas to cover but relatively few subscribers?

"Larry" <noone@home.com> wrote in message
news:Xns98A4A56407DF4noonehomecom@208.49.80.253...
> decaturtxcowboy <nope_none_@nowayspam.com> wrote in news:XBVjh.41289
> $wP1.32181@newssvr14.news.prodigy.net:
>
>> Considering that Texas can overlay most of eastern Europe.
>>
>>
>
> Americans' geography training is fun to play with.

Blatant diversionary tactic.


> I lived and worked in
> Iran for a little over 2 years back in the late 70's, leaving 28 days
> before the Shahanshah fled the country.

Maybe you should have stayed there.


> He just the
> opposite of the bloodthirsty, Islamic terrorist America's Jewish TV wants
> you to think about to keep the bankers' war machine running.

"Jewish TV?" You just lost all credibility, and revealed your true colors.


--
Mike

"carcarx" <carcarx@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1167146233.609104.319530@a3g2000cwd.googlegro ups.com...
>
>
> On Dec 24, 10:59 am, Larry <n...@home.com> wrote:
>>
>> > users in the U.S. alone.NTSC is the "installed base" of analog TV in
>> > the US as well
>
> Other countries, as well, not just the US.
>
>>....It's the
>> worst TV system on the planet with only 525 lines vs 800 or more for
>> everyone else.
>
> PAL is 625@50Hz, and the jerkiness due to the low refresh rate is quite
> apparent
> during even modest motion.
>

And keep in mind NTSC (color) was discussed for years, and the standard
approved in 1953--a decade before PAL was introduced (with the first PAL
broadcast not until 1967). By that time Americans were already used to color
TV, and a variety of available channels and programming. The UK had what, 2
or 3 channels at the time? (I'll leave the UK's "license your TV" nonsense
out of this :-).)

Anyway, a standard that has held up for more than half a century ain't all
that bad. Actually, it was so "good enough" that early HDTV comparison tests
(late 1980s) showed that average viewers didn't really notice much
difference--or at least care enough to pay for it.

But to fault the US for moving forward with working systems, covering large
terrains, whether it be TV or cellular service, is short-sighted.

'Course after ol' Larry's "Jewish TV" comment in another post, I wouldn't
bother with any of his nonsensical comments. (Not referring to you here,
carcarx.)

YMMV, IMHO...


--
Mike

John Richards wrote:

> Can a business afford to greatly undercut a competitor's prices if it means
> losing money? Instead of imagining some grand conspiracy, could it be
> that all the wireless companies have pretty much the same cost basis and
> the same technological limits?

Not the same cost basis at all, which is why similar prices for service
don't result in identical profit margins. The carriers that went from
AMPS to TDMA to GSM, spent a lot more money on capital expenditures than
the ones that went from AMPS to CDMA. This is why Verizon's margins have
been so much higher. Now that Cingular has completed its GSM conversion,
its margins are going up, but still lag considerably.

Unfortunately, you can't price your products higher just because your
cost basis is higher, unless you offer some other compelling advantage.
As the Consumer Reports and JD Power surveys show, there is no
compelling advantage that Cingular could charge more for.

Larry wrote:

> Just because it's deployed in the USA, doesn't mean it's any good or "the
> best".

The converse is true too. Europe would have been much better off with a
transition to CDMA, and the carriers wanted to switch, but the
governments wouldn't allow it.

> Why does this thread have so many defenders of our crazy oddball digital
> schemes? Wouldn't it be nice to have a phone you can crawl on a plane with
> in Atlanta and fly to London or Paris and it just works? I think that
> matters more than what modulation scheme it's using.

Whatever the reason for our plethora of systems, and the differences,
the fact remains that Nokia is writing off a lot of potential business.

CDMA, in one form or another, is taking over, all over the globe. It'd
have been nice to settle on one system, but that didn't happen.

The reason that CDMA dominates in the U.S. has a practical basis. It's
much more bandwidth efficient, and there is more limited spectrum
available in the U.S.. It also has much greater range, which doesn't
matter in dense European cities, but matters a lot when you're trying to
cover the most possible area of a sparsely populated large country like
the U.S.. Look at GM's OnStar system, which is going from AMPS to CDMA,
due to their effort to keep as much coverage as possible.

"Tinman" <ask@for.it> wrote in news:4vd17rF1be1u2U1@mid.individual.net:

> "Jewish TV?" You just lost all credibility, and revealed your true
> colors.
>
>

Do you dispute that Jews own and control American commercial TV, or is this
the usual anti-semetic bullshit everytime someone dares say "jew" outside a
synagogue?

Perhaps you should choose any American TV network and look at who owns them
and controls the content.....perhaps.

While you're researching that, get a list of the top 50 bureaucrats in any
Federal bureaucracy and compare names....They're quite easy to spot.

Then, do the Federal Reserve Corporation, who controls the money and power
in the country.

This isn't a state secret.....