Re: Ira's Poetry Break

Ray Peck (rpeck@PureAtria.COM)
Sat, 16 Nov 1996 22:26:23 -0800 (PST)


>Uh, I thought the cellular stuff was digital? The only artefacts being voice
>compression alias?

Most cellular is analog. I have digital TDMA (?). It's great until
the signal goes below a certain level. Fading out on an analog phone
isn't too nice, but digitals just cut out completely.

Big advantage: air time is 1/2 the cost, because they can carry 3x the
conversations on the same cells (and pocket the 50% difference).

>The usual good cell stuff has a standby of max 50 hours, I thought.
>
>> standby for two days, or you can talk for four hours, or some combination
>
>4 hours? It's not too sensational.

Bwaa haa haa. My Nokia/AT&T 6300 is 8 hours standby, something like
30 minutes talking with the Ni-metal-hydride battery ($100 extra).

The new model has software improvements which bump this to 20 hours
standby and I don't know how many talking.

>Check out the Motorola website (must be http://www.motorola.com), they've
>progressed quite far Iridium-wise (which is just planetwide satellite
>cellular), now they're trying to launch a Internet-thru-space
>project,

Huges has sateelite net access right now. See www.direcpc.com (note
no T). I'm thinking of going for it in lieu of ISDN, but they never
returned my email (bad sign), part of which asked if I can serve
multiple IP addresses with it, by hooking it up to a WinNT-server
machine and routing from it to my network.

They only support Windoze machines at the moment.