Quote:
Originally Posted by Webby
I've forgotten all about cellphones in the EU - it has been a long time since moving out  But remember it was no big deal...
Tho always remember living in the US and amazed at the lack of decent service (connection) in comparison to the EU and was surprised the US was not far ahead in cell technology - tho suspect it has improved a lot since that time. |
my gym is about 4 blocks away from Zango/180 solutions. Right next to them is T-Mobiles US headquarters. On the other side of the gym is the west coast headquarters for Verizon... another good friend of mine that i play racquetball with is an exec from Nokia. One day, 5-6 of us were talking and everyone realized they all worked for the mobile phone companies. I asked them why the mobile market and technology is always so fucked up here. People in the US who don't travel extensively probably have no idea that US cell phone carriers/service is always about 3-5 years behind Europe and Japan/Korea. It has always been that way since the beginning.
its was interesting to hear the answers. I might be fucking up some of the details but basically they said it has to do with a few core issues, the first of which is the fact that all these carriers here were competing for so many years with different technologies trying to become the standard (whereas, everywhere else, GSM is the standard). Another factor is that they typically don't cooperate with each other on any level (vs. other countries cooperating extensively across borders) Another huge factor is the size of the country and how spread out shit is... with the level of competition here, they all basically have build their own networks across the entire country, fighting each state, environmentalists etc.
Ask someone here what 3G is and they will look at you like you are retarded, yet it was common in Europe 5 years ago and is light years ahead in terms of how much data can be handled across a network... yet for these guys here, each carrier will basically have to build their own 3G network across the country... so its not going to be commonplace here anytime soon.
i remember being out of the country for several years and coming back in about 1999 and tried to buy a GSM phone here in Seattle. no one knew what "GSM" meant. no one knew what a SIM card was. I was trying to buy a triband GSM phone so i could travel and they were staring at me as if i was trying to explain that i was a robot from the future.
i have seen maybe 4 TV commericials in my life for ringtones. maybe 5 or so for sms chat/dating. from europe, thats probably hard to imagine.