cell phones

Tuesday, April 23, 2002, at 01:22PM

By Eric Richardson

I really know more than most people should about cell phones. Everyone else just cares about making and receiving calls, and here I am looking at things like what Voicestream's LA build-out is going to do to Cingular's network saturation and the details of GPRS roaming.

Today I called Cingular and got changed to a newer rate plan (my 350 minute national plan went down $10), activated Wireless Internet Express (GPRS... 1mb included), and asked a lot of roaming questions. Wireless Internet will roam fine in Muskegon on NPI, and when I'm in Grand Rapids or Chicago I should be able to roam onto Voicestream's GPRS network. I've only done the most trivial playing with GPRS so far, but it's definitely faster and a quicker connect time. Now I just need to find a good way to monitor the traffic I put through it to keep from going over the 1mb cap.