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 _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
