2007-01-15 03:54:05 · 3 answers · asked by CHARLIELINDA 2 in Consumer Electronics ➔ Cell Phones & Plans
actually i work for cingular and we have discontinued the use of cdma and tdma by the end of march 07 they will all be disabled. cingular is offering new gsm phones for free to replace them. and also as of december 2006 cingular wont allow prepaid customers with tdma phones to add more minutes until they upgrade to a new gsm phone.
here's and article at mobiletracker.com
http://www.mobiletracker.net/archives/2006/03/22/cingular-tdma
know this is just cingular i'm not sure what other carriers are planning on doing. but since the merger of cingular and at&t this process has been taking affect.
2007-01-15 04:51:14 · answer #1 · answered by mr s 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
A GSM phone without a SIM card is only good for emergency (i.e. 911) calls only. If you mean how much longer will there be other kinds of phones besides GSM? Probably for a long time, in North America anyway. CDMA doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. South Korea still uses it and that's where a lot of the phone technology comes from, i.e. Samsung. Japan doesn't use GSM either but their phones still take SIM cards. I've noticed now that Nextel's new iDEN phones will take SIM cards, so perhaps CDMA will evolve to be able to do the same. However as long as the iDEN and CDMA networks stay active, they will still allow those with older phones which don't take SIM cards to use the system. Once everyone evolves to 3G, everyone will use SIM cards. I just looked at the 3G CDMA spec (CDMA2000) and they will have SIM cards, too. I don't expect this to come around for some years yet.
2007-01-15 12:06:03 · answer #2 · answered by Geoff S 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
as long as the phone can support the cell phone's companies signal.
however youll only be able to make 911 calls
2007-01-15 12:04:05 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋