Community update: The 850 MHz issue

hank williams hank777 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 6 17:38:07 CET 2007


On 11/6/07, thomas.cooksey at bt.com <thomas.cooksey at bt.com> wrote:
> >Its really hard to imagine a company building a phone that didnt think
> >through what frequencies were needed. More interestingly, that it took
> >a trip from Michael to Taiwan to get anyone to focus on it. If this
> >substantially sets back the development effort, it really is a major
> >blow to the project.
>
> In all fairness to OpenMoko, I think 850 Mhz is only used by the USA and
> Canada, which only account for ~10% of mobile phones in the world.
> That's according to statistics at
> http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P7222
>         United States: 201.6m + Canada: 16.6m = 218.2m
>         World: 2.14bn
>

Yes, but that does not take into account types of phones. The world is
full of super cheap phones that sell for a few dollars, particularly
in developing nations. But This is a smart phone. And I strongly
suspect the smart phone sales percentages are much larger than 10% in
the US.


> So the OpenMoko can still be used in 90% of the GSM world. Although,
> having said that, I feel people's pain. :-(
>
> Plus I guess you have to factor in that the number of potential OpenMoko
> users/developers/hackers in the USA is probably _way_ higher than 10%.
> :-)
>
Indeed.


Hank




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