wmartin@st-louis-emh2.army.mil (Will Martin) (06/06/89)
A telecom-related point came up in the news coverage of the recent troubles in Beijing over this past weekend. When describing and playing back the tape of the incident where the troops took the CBS correspondents into custody during the clearing of the square, Dan Rather referred to the audio feed as coming from "a cellular telephone" on at least two separate newscasts. This sort of surprised me. Does Beijing have cellular telephone service? I would have expected them to have some form of mobile telephones, but maybe only for official government use, not available to foreign correspondents or even ordinary citizens. I certainly may be wrong in that supposition, though. Having cellular phone service readily available just doesn't seem to me to be that likely. Also, that it was still working during that period is surprising; I would have thought the telephone service would have been shut down by the Army. Just how worldwide IS cellular telephone service implemented? I didn't think it even was available all over Europe yet. Where in the Third World can one use a cellular phone, and are all the systems interchangeable and compatible? Or would what the CBS correspondents had been using have been some system that they took with them and installed themselves to support their newsgathering activities? I recall seeing a military-oriented portable cellular system advertised in one of the magazines, maybe Defense Electronics. Are such things available for private purchase? (I would think the red tape and paperwork involved in getting official approval for bringing such a system into a foreign country, especially a Communist country, would be monumental and prohibitive.) Maybe all this technology has run on far faster than I realized, and it is not unusual to have a cellular phone in Nairobi or Quito. Any comments on this situation? Regards, Will Martin PS: I have gotten some messages from people asking about getting access to the "Dave-Barry" mailing list, because I mentioned that when forwarding his piece on call waiting. Unfortunately, "reply" has generated some failed mail and I can't get back to those people. So, if you sent me a message and didn't get any answer, it isn't because I didn't try! Send mail to "rassilon@eddie.mit.edu" to be added to that list. -WM)
tim@Athena.UUCP (Tim Dawson) (06/07/89)
As an FYI, while I was working as a systems Engineer at Motorola Cellular, one of the major projects that we had in house was the design/implementation of a large scale Celular system for Beijing. This system is real! -- ================================================================================ Tim Dawson (...!killer!mcsd!Athena!tim) Motorola Computer Systems, Dallas, TX. "The opinions expressed above do not relect those of my employer - often even I cannot figure out what I am talking about."