Column

Global Mobile

Network Computing Mobile Observer, May 23, 2007

By Peter Rysavy

I recently completed a combined business and personal trip to China,
spending time in Beijing, Shanghai and nearby areas. To maximize my
connection opportunities, I brought a Cingular/AT&T 8525 that supports
quad-band GSM/EDGE (800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1.8 GHz, 1.9 GHz), tri-band
UMTS/HSDPA (800 MHz, 1.9 GHz, 2.1 GHz) and Wi-Fi with IEEE 802.11g. To
expand communications options further, I installed Skype on the phone,
with the idea of using it over Wi-Fi. I figured if this combination
would not let me stay connected, nothing would. I also took a close look
at pricing for international usage, so I wouldn't have any rude
surprises the next time I received my bill. As it turned out, my ability
to communicate was superb. But I had to closely watch my usage, as
overseas usage without an international usage plan is extremely
expensive.

The first stop was in Tokyo for a few hours before connecting to
Beijing. I didn't have high expectations, as GSM is not available in
Japan. However, my phone promptly registered onto the NTT DoCoMo network
in UMTS 3G mode, and I was able to easily download my e-mail. That was
exciting, even if the actual e-mails weren't.

The next stop was in Beijing. My phone registered onto China Mobile's
GMS/EDGE network, and connectivity was a breeze for voice and data.
Coverage was never an issue, with my phone almost never showing less
than three out of four bars of signal strength. This was no surprise
given all the cell towers I saw, both in the cities as well as in rural
areas. As of the beginning of 2007, China Mobile had more subscribers
than the population of the United States, so I suppose that takes a few
cell sites to support. Even on a tour to the Great Wall I had constant
connectivity, including walking on the Great Wall. This was impressive,
given that we were in the mountains, albeit in a dense tourist zone.
Data operation was a breeze, though occasionally I had a problem
establishing the initial data connection. But once I had it, I could
keep the data connection going all day with no issues, and I didn't run
into this problem in other areas in China. That was the good news for
connectivity.

The bad news was the expense. Without having signed up for an
international plan, data roaming cost $19.50 per megabyte and voice
usage was $2.29 per minute. For voice, this is clearly extremely
expensive, but for data, it's not as bad as you might think. Granted, a
typical hour of Web browsing that consumes 10 MB of data would have cost
$200, but judicious use of e-mail with a 5-KB maximum message size
actually translates to just 10 cents per e-mail. You could even reduce
the 5-KB value to 2 KB, but then you would get too many incomplete
e-mails. And the only way of getting the rest of the e-mail with Windows
Mobile Outlook is to download the entire rest of the message. The net of
this careful e-mail usage was that I only spent about $30 on e-mail over
10 days. I didn't survey the other operators for their global pricing,
but I would expect it to be similar.

I stayed in a Westernized hotel with good amenities that offered
international dialing from the room, which I knew would be extremely
expensive, Ethernet for Internet access and a business center that had
PCs as well as Wi-Fi access to the Internet. At first I thought that
using the business center's Wi-Fi would be less expensive than cellular
data, but I never even bothered, as the cost was about $4 for a
15-minute minimum usage.

As for voice, I thought about Skype over the hotel's Wi-Fi network. My
prior research showed that people successfully use their Skype Out
accounts for global calling at 2 cents per minute, but as noted, the
Wi-Fi cost was very high. I also tried Wi-Fi visiting some friends, but
they had locked down their network with MAC address filtering and didn't
know how to change it. Instead, I purchased what is called an IP phone
card for China Unicom, and that allowed calls to the United States at
about 30 cents per minute. For the limited number of calls I had to
make, this was fine. The hotel surcharge for dialing the access number
was just a few pennies per minute.

Though I went to China for this experiment, usage in the more than 200
countries supporting GSM would have been about the same for both
connectivity and pricing. Four days after I got back, AT&T announced a
global PDA plan with data access priced significantly lower, at $70 for
20 MB. There are also international BlackBerry plans. In addition,
Sprint and Verizon have new international plans, though their CDMA
networks require you to obtain dual-mode GSM/CDMA devices or to rent a
GSM phone. These international plans make sense for regular overseas
travelers but not for people traveling only occasionally.

Bottom line, getting wireless voice and data anywhere in the world has
become extremely easy. Just be careful how you use it.

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