On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, David Beierl wrote:

> At 02:37 AM 1/17/2003, zampano wrote:
> >  How come cell phones still are horribly
> >unreliable all over the U.S?? When I could use them in Italy,
> >Switzerland and Germany 8 years ago on mountain peaks, valleys, subway
> >stations, anywhere except tunnels???
>
> Have you compared the sizes?  Germany for example, has a helicopter/trauma
> center setup that can get people to a trauma center from anywhere in the
> country in fifteen minutes.  This is great, but they have only about
> one-eighth the land mass per inhabitant (230/km^2 vs 27/km^2 ten or fifteen
> years ago)

That's part of it, but another major difference is that Europe
standardized on one digital cell phone standard.  In the U.S., there
wasn't the political will to do this, so we have three completely
incompatible phone networks.  For everyone to get reliable service the
whole country has to be covered in triplicate!  This is one case where a
little more government intervention would have benefited everyone.

             _ _
  __ _ _   _| | |  | David M. Brodbeck (N8SRE)              Ypsilanti, MI
 / _` | | | | | |  +-----------------------------------------------------
| (_| | |_| | | | @ cyberspace.org
 \__, |\__,_|_|_| "To the optimist, the glass is half full.  To the
 |___/             pessimist, the glass is half empty.  To the engineer,
                   the glass is twice as big as it needs to be."