Roaming in the USA

Strictly, this section applies to most of the Americas, but is specifically about roaming in the United States of America.

Types of network

AMPS (Analog Mobile Phone System)

This runs on 800MHz. In use since the 1980s, the US's FCC says it must to stay active until 2007, though fewer and fewer people are using it. National providers Verizon, AT&T, and Cingular will be phasing it over time. It has coverage in 80% of the geographic US area, and most of the reaining users are in rural areas.

TDMA (Time Divison Multiple Access)

Used since the mid 90s, offered by national providers AT T and Cingular, it is being replaced by GSM/GRPS, TDMA has no decent data capabilities, but has decent coverage nationwide

CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access)

Around since the mid 90s, used by Verizon and Sprint PCS, CDMA has data as fast as EDGE nationwide and has data as fast as UMTS in select cities (will be nationwide on verizon soon), best digital coverage.

GSM/GRPS/EDGE

This is offered by Cingular, AT&T, and T-Mobile, AT&T has EDGE nationwide, T-Mobile are rolling it out nationally. Coverage isn't as good as TDMA/CDMA/AMPS, but most TDMA networks are slowly being moved to GSM.

Because the frequencies used everywhere else are no available in the US, GSM operates at 800MHz, 850 MHz and 1900MHz. Many modern handsets sold in Europe and the UK operate at 1900MHz, but few work at 800MHz or 850MHz as well as the "standard" 900MHz and 1800MHz GSM frequencies.

iDEN

iDEN is a propietary network by Motorola used by Nextel and Southern LINC. It is a push-to-talk walkie-talkie service. It uses the SMR band, only used by iDEN for mobile phones.

Roaming in the USA

If you take your sim card to the USA, you may be able to put it in a rented or borrowed GSM 1900 handset, but many of these handsets in the USA are locked to their Service Provider's sim cards. You can, however, rent suitable handsets in the UK, or you could buy a triple-band handset to use. These are increasingly common in the UK.

Costs

On some networks, the cost of calling the US is fairly low, so you would expect that incoming calls when roaming there would be cheap. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Traditionally in the USA, calling mobile phones has cost no more than ringing another local number (often free). The mobile phone user pays for the mobile cost of incoming calls. This has been a factor in the popularity of pagers and relatively low take-up of mobile phones in the US.

Expect to pay around 80p per minute for the incoming call charge in addition to what your Service Provider charges you for forwarding incoming calls across the Atlantic. This may take a month or two to appear on your bill, but it will! Outgoing calls are similarly expensive when roaming in the US. Consider buying a calling card to use to phone home with, using a payphone, rather than a mobile.

Coverage

The US has a lot of empty space, and like the other mobile networks there, the GSM 1900 networks do not have comprehensive coverage, but there is coverage in most of the big cities and population centres, and on many main roads.

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