Re: [87attendees] SIM purchase at the IETF (was Re: [87all] IETF 87 Berlin Meeting Review)

["John R Levine" <[e-mail]>]

> In Orlando, I found out that my phone would work on the Verizon network, 
> but not AT&T. If the booth sold AT&T sims, we could have a nice, big 
> discussion about why we didn't have Verizon and how I've wasted $X for a 
> card that doesn't work.

North America is unusual in having two completely incompatible cell phone 
systems.  Verizon and Sprint in the US and Bell in Canada are CDMA, AT&T 
and T-Mobile in the US and Rogers and Telus in Canada are GSM, on 
different bands than GSM in most of the rest of the world (850 and 1900 
rather than 900 and 1800.)  Pelephone in Israel is one of the very few 
mobile carriers elsewhere that is compatible with American CDMA.

I think it's reasonable to expect people to know what kind of phone they 
have and what kind of networks it will work on before they go looking for 
SIMs.  In your case it's easy, since CDMA phones don't have SIMs.

Regards,
John Levine, [e-mail], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly