J Kelly wrote:
>> >>>> This raises a question I thought of recently, but had not bothered to
>>>> ask anyone about. Suppose I start a cell call in local but move to a
>>>> roaming tower during the call? Does the call get charged as roaming >>>> or not?
>>> I doubt you'd get a handoff in a situation like that. It'd drop the
>>> call and you'd call back.
>> I worked for a small cellular carrier about 7 years ago. I would
>> routinely test handoffs from our network to the network adjacent to >> us.
> If this was 7 years ago, I'm guessing it was analog service; it
> certainly was not GSM. I'd be interested to see what happens on some
> of those calls today using GSM service. Often things touted as "new
> and improved" aren't. That's my impression of GSM, at least the way
> it is being implemented now. While it is hard for a user to tell when
> a call is handed off to another site, I don't think I have ever had a
> successful hand-off with GSM. I have, however, had a LOT of calls
> dropped when moving ... sometimes just a few feet.
It was analog. I've used GSM (we got GSM here in 1997, btw). Worked great. Never handed off between networks with it (there is no other network to hand to) but routinely would drive 50+ miles on the same call and not drop. And I know that CDMA can hand off, either soft or hard. I'm guessing here, but it probably has to do a hard handoff between networks (or other MTSOs on the same network) while a soft handoff can occur between sites on the same MTSO.