Re: OT: Cellular telephone service

Eve Kotyk wrote:
> I've been thinking of getting a cell phone and it sounds as though there is a general lean toward Rogers overall. However my husband is with Rogers and I can't reach him at the U of S because the building he works in is concrete (or at least I'm assuming it is). His coworkers can use their cells in that building but he can't. Is this a provider problem or is this a cellphone problem?

The problem is RF. Concrete blocks RF if there's enough of it
(especially since they usually reinforce it with steel bars inside,
which dampen the signal further). I've noticed that Sasktel and Telus
phones generally are able to fall-back to analog, or different frequency
bands, to work around it. Some GSM phones (Rogers, Fido) also do this
-- but you need a quad-band phone.

My Nokia, for example, is Tri-band. However, the main frequency band it
can use in North America is GSM-1900 -- which is easier to block, since
it's a higher frequency rate. It supports GSM-900 (which has better
range), but Canada and US use GSM-850, which my phone doesn't speak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_ranges

Each phone will act differently as well, since they have different radio
bits.
Received on Tue Sep 5 13:02:33 2006