The USA Mobile Disconnection

I continue traveling across the USA. Have been on the road for more than two weeks now. Armed with many mobile weapons, many interesting observations come to my mind. The truth is I have mostly been to remote areas - mountains and national parks of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and now California.

• The most often used form of connection has been WiFi at various hotels. There has been just one lodge (Cliff Dwellings, AZ) that did not offer complimentary wireless Internet. And having a morning coffee in front of my room with a computer on my laps, other guests approached me asking "have you found a wifi here?". WiFi becomes as expected in a hotel room as a hair dryer or a coffee maker. Still there is a rule of thumb - budget hotels give WiFi for free, while the expensive ones prefer to charge for this "luxury".


• UMA on my Orange Blackberry works very well. Most of the time (but not always - I suspect some firewalled ports) the phone logs on to the home Orange.PL network tunneling via WiFi, to avoid roaming charges. I had some long discussions with my bank and I was glad I did not have to pay these ridiculus roaming prices. A friend of mine has T-Mobile (PL) phone that logs on to the T-Mobile (USA) network and calling home costs her $3 a minute... like 20 yeares ago... At the same time mine over UMA is $0,03 a minute - two orders of magnitude a difference. I just wonder how long such high roaming rates will hold... When the real cost of transmitting a 9,6kb/s stream of packets around the globe is virtually zero...


• In many areas my phone was displaying "Emergency calls only", meaning there was a network coverage in the area, but the network did not have a roaming agreement with my home network. Very strange in the GSM world... I thought such days are gone long time ago... Why would not one MNO signed a roaming agreement with another one? Especially when there are roaming aggregators...


• There are still problems with packet data roaming... Even big MNOs, like AT&T often let me just do basic voice calls but no data... Weird... I remember this was a common problem ten years ago, when GPRS was introduced... but in 2009?


• SMS text messages often take several hours to reach their destinations... A record I remember back in 2003 was a message I sent from USA to Poland that arrived three weeks later... Subscribers are accustomed to sub-second SMS delivery time... And they are really surprised a 160-byte message can still travel four hours across the Atlantic...


• My Virgin Mobile CDMA data dongle is somehow disappointing... My thinking behind the purchase was CDMA coverage was much better in the US compared to GSM. So I should have a CDMA modem along with my GSM BlackBerry smartphone to stay connected. But unfortunately in the rural areas it was showing no signal. Only in Zion NP (UT) it allowed me to publish some photos via Picasa Web Albums over 1xRTT connection.


• The CDMA data dongle handles EVDO to 1xRTT handovers not better UMTS to GSM handovers are handled in the GSM world. I mean it often breaks a connection, which is frustrating, especially as after subsequent reconnects it automatically opens the Virgin Mobile web page, eating kilobytes from the pay-as-you-go plan...

So that is about it for a report from the road... I do know and understand USA is a big and not densely populated country. But it seems it is not the physical radio coverage where the disconnectivity problem has its roots... It is a disconnection on various operational levels of mobile networks here, that still makes me think of bringing a satellite dish with me when I will be back with a next visit...