Stage of GTA03 development?

Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller hns at computer.org
Thu Dec 18 15:08:09 CET 2008


I think this discussion does not get my original point, which does  
take the useage pattern into account.

When I am at work, at University, at home, visiting friends, I always  
have an open WiFi. In most of these locations I also have HSDPA.
At my parents, mother-in-law's location or in holidays in the  
mountains or at a nice beach there was always neither WIFI nor HSDPA  
and my Huawei did fall back to GPRS. That was slow but it works. At no  
extra cost. And no need to find a WLAN hotspot.

So having GPRS is better than having nothing. And my UMTS contract at  
20 EUR per month includes GPRS.

I acknowledge that others have different useage patterns (urban areas  
walking/driving through the streets), but that is not my typical  
pattern. And I agree that having UMTS with auto-fallback to GPRS is  
easier to use than switching between GPRS and WIFI. But when I have to  
live with GPRS in rural areas anyway, why not also at urban ones until  
cheap 3G modules become available for a GTA04.

Therefore I came to the conclusion that it is not mandatory for me but  
a nice to have.

Coming to cost, the pattern is:

Network		Speed	Cost
-----------         ---------    ------
open WiFi	fast		free
paid WiFi	fast		quite expensive (20 EUR / 24h)
UMTS		fast		my 20 EUR flat rate
GPRS		slow	included in my 20 EUR UMTS flat rate

So the result is that I will no longer use the paid WiFi services  
because they are too expensive compared to using fallback GPRS.

Nikolaus

Am 18.12.2008 um 14:48 schrieb Steven Le Roux:

> more than 10 000 wifi access points. less than 1% opened, less than
> 0,4% opened by acknwoledgement





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