I'm not bashing them. Up until recently, everyone agreed that AT&T and
Verizon had the best coverage on TDMA and CDMA respectively. It's just
lately, up in Northern California anyway, that there have been a lot more
complaints of TDMA coverage getting worse.

A lot of people won't move to GSM because of the nationwide coverage issues,
and planned on staying with TDMA until the GSM network is built out.

I'm not an ATTWS basher at all...I even have one of their phones,
though I'm not sure how long I'm hanging onto it (VZW is my main
carrier).  But there've been a number of folks noticing the
degradation of TDMA coverage lately.  It probably isn't everywhere,
and isn't as bad in some areas as others, but it's definitely
happening.

Mike

Actually, it's true - GSM DOES work via satellite!  My company was the first
that I know of to implement 13 kbps GSM voice encoding on a satellite link.
We built two-way satellite telecom terminals and sold 'em in Asia,
Australia, Central America and a few in Africa.  We chose GSM because its
voice quality is quite good for the relatively low 13 kbps bit rate.
Totally different application from cellular telephones, but the terminals do
work in the international public switched telephone network.

George

Whatever some dumbass CSR may have said, AT&T Wireless is not turning
off TDMA to add GSM.  The only tradeoff that's happening is that they
are reallocating some 850 MHz spectrum from TDMA to GSM.  No sites are
going down.  Look... obviously it was a dumb CSR if they said
something about the GSM coming from satellites.  I also was told by a
AT&T Wireless salesman that the GSM phone would work on a cruise
because if you weren't in range of a site it would automatically lock
on to a satellite.  So I'll grant you that the CSRs are dumb, but AT&T
Wireless is not turning off TDMA sites.

I don't know where you got that stat from,  but the range of a GSM site is 35
kilometers which is equivalent to exactly 21.8 miles. This has proven correct
for me because I live in a rural area of Northeast Pennsylvania and the towers
are few and far between however when I log onto mmode and select "what's
nearby?" and then select either dining, shops etc. the auto locate detects the
tower that my phone is using a signal on and depending  on which part of the
house I am in the auto-locate picks up either 1 of 3 towers that are closest to
my home and all 3 are within a 16 to 20 mile radius of my home. I know this
because after I OK the auto-locate I get a list of businesses with the name of
the business, it's address and phone number and the proximity of miles that the
business is within the radius of the tower. IMHO it's a nifty little feature
that I find mmode really only worth of value especially living in a very rural
area. When I had ATTWS TDMA I couldn't even pick up a signal at my home but
with ATTWS GSM my reception, RF is excellent. By the way I use the Siemens
SL56, one of the best phones I have ever had with ATTWS since ATTWS in my area
went GSM in October of 2002.
As for the range of TDMA I honestly don't know what the stat is on that
frequency.
Just my 2 cents.