CL wrote:

> Global Roaming is excellent if you travel a lot.  The main problem is 
> that there are two types of phone systems out there and they are not 
> compatible.  G3 was started by Vodaphone (Softbank) and is all over 
> Europe and part of the US.  The other system, CDMA, was adopted by au 
> and is used mainly in the Eastern US and Canada.  

Apropos of "au", a quick-and-dirty US-style CDMA system was whipped in
by one Australian telco (Telstra) some years ago, using infrastructure
recycled from its older AMPS analogue network. It was mainly put in
to keep country people quiet, because the GSM network with its 27km
max cell-radius didn't have the reach of pure analogue systems. That
CDMA network is being turned off *tomorrow* to create space for its
expanding WCDMA service (marketed as "Next G").

-- 
Jim Breen        http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Clayton School of Information Technology,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia
ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学