Today's mobile phone technology troubles 4153

Well, it may be ridiculous, but it's not technology's fault.

See, in days of yore when analog cell service came along, there was basically only one way to do it (called "AMPS"). Now that we have digital, we have a whole mess of different ways (GSM like Cingular & T-mobile, CDMA like Verizon & Alltel, TDMA like Nextel, PCS like Sprint). In the old days, if you were within range of any companies' cell site, you had service, because they all used the same system. Now, if you have a CDMA phone & are in range of a GSM site, you're out of luck.

Where it gets interesting is the FCC requires all the cell carriers to support the old-fashioned analog AMPS service on their digital sites. So if you've got an old analog phone, it works! regardless of whether you're in range of a CDMA site or GSM site or whatever.

In Europe, they don't have this problem, because all digital service is GSM. We wouldn't have it here, either, if the FCC had set a standard for digital service, instead of saying "use what you like, as long as you keep that old analog stuff working".

Unfortunately for you, that FCC rule about analog service is going away, because it's expensive to maintain that stuff, and hardly anyone uses it. As you've seen, the carriers are going to try charging to cover the cost of keeping the analog system running. My guess is virtually no-one will pay, and in a year or two analog cell service won't exist.

John