2009/9/25 Chris Dennis <cgden...@btinternet.com>: > > One question, somewhat off-topic: how well do these high-tech phones > manage with accessing the internet over GPRS rather than 3G? Vodafone's > 3G coverage is pretty much absent out here in the frontier-land of the > Hampshire/Dorset border: will that make something like the N900 > pretty-much useless? >
I have worked for a mobile network manufacturer in the past so I know a bit about this. GMS is the old style mobile phone standard. GMS networks support a packet service called GPRS. GPRS just stands for General Packet Radio Service. The newer standard is generally called 3G, but is standard based name is 3GPP or UMTS. Ref: http://www.3gpp.org/ 3G supports all the older services found on GMS, but introduces some new signalling and codecs, whereby it can send more data to the handset. So, for 3G, the packet service is still GPRS, it just has bigger bandwidth to play with and sometimes called HSDPA. 3G is designed to be able to fall back gracefully to GSM, so any 3G phone should be able to work in GMS mode without any problem. In fact, one should be able to start a phone call on 3G, and have the phone move to GSM without cutting off the call, but in practice, it might not work. Conclusion: A 3G phone should still be able to fall back to do GSM based GPRS. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
