Karl wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Feb 2007 06:13:49 GMT, John Navas
> <spamfilter1@navasgroup.com> wrote:
>
>
>>AMPS will soon be going away,
>
>
>
>
> Name the date. You been scaring folks with that for years, and its
> still far off.

When the FCC permits AMPS to be shut down in 2008, it will almost
certainly immediately be shut down in areas that are covered by digital
service, because it uses a lot of bandwidth unnecessarily.

However, remote areas, where AMPS is the only service, will almost
certainly not have AMPS shut down, at least by the rural CDMA/AMPS
carriers. There are several reasons for this. First, a lot of emergency
call boxes are in areas with no digital coverage, and these call boxes
use AMPS. Second, a lot of the AMPS coverage is by smaller carriers in
rural areas, and AMPS represents roaming revenue. Third, AMPS provides
the only coverage for locals in a lot of the area covered by these
carriers. There is no cost savings in turning off AMPS unless there is a
capacity issue, and the rural carriers don't have capacity issues.

For AMPS areas that are currently covered only by Cingular AMPS, they
will almost certainly turn off AMPS even in their areas that have no
digital coverage. For example, I was recently out in the Florida
Everglades, roaming onto Cingular's AMPS network from my Verizon
tri-band phone (Verizon doesn't have an AMPS network in South Florida,
both the A&B side 800 MHz networks are now AT&T). 95% of Cingular's
customers can't use that AMPS network, and had no coverage. It makes
Cingular look bad when only Verizon, Sprint, Alltel, etc's customers can
use one of their networks. Hence, I think that Cingular will turn of all
AMPS as soon as they can, even though this means vast areas with no
coverage will be created. Fortunately, there are not a lot of areas
where Cingular is the only AMPS carrier.

Metro areas with rural areas surrounding them, will suffer when AMPS is
permitted to be turned off. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area,
there are a lot of areas outside the urban core, sometimes only a few
miles from the urban core, where AMPS is the only coverage you're able
to get. A lot of these areas are city, county, state, and national
parks, where they are unlikely to permit enough towers to cover the
areas in digital, but where you currently get decent AMPS coverage from
towers outside the parks. All the coverage in these areas will be lost
when AMPS is turned off. This is good news for Cingular, which has much
poorer coverage, at least in my area, by virtue of their lack of AMPS.
I'm hoping that the state of California will insist that all the
roadside call boxes remain operational, which will give AMPS a bit more
life, even in the semi-urban areas.