ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Australia / US converter

From the Jaycar website as suggested by Trumpy, this is a 100 VA unit with a 240V lead and 110V socket.

I lived in a house that was wired for both 110 and 240 volts, on the western corner of the Simpson Desert. There was a double 110V outlet in each room and in the kitchen fed from a 2.5 Kw transformer mounted in the laundry above the door.

The outlets were made by Clipsal in the Prestige style (seperate switch mechanisms & outlets that clipped into the faceplate), the outlets have the part number UL415M on them.

And here's the website:

http://www.jaycar.com.au/

Re the GSM phone issue, are both 900 and 1800 used in Aussie, or just 900MHz?

"Tri-band" often confuses people, since it can mean different things in different places.

Tri-band phones sold in the U.K. are usually 900/1800 (the British/European bands) plus 1900 for the Americas.

Tri-band phones sold in the U.S. will normally be 850/1900 for North America plus 900 for Europe.

Triband phones are really only a partial solution to roaming. If you want decent coverage and access to a choice of networks you need to be able to access both 900Mhz and 1800Mhz GSM in Europe and 850Mhz and 1900Mhz in the US/Canada. So, quad band's the only way to go!

Ireland for example allocates a mixture of 900Mhz and 1800Mhz spectrum to each of the GSM providers. They tend to use 900Mhz for 'blanket coverage' and then supplement it with 1800Mhz cells in busier areas in city centres.

I know the UK originally allocated exclusively 900Mhz or 1800Mhz licences. So, the likes of Vodafone and O2 were on 900Mhz only as they were the oldest operators and then the newer players like T-Mobile and Orange would have had 1800Mhz allocations. I'm not sure if this is the case anymore, or if everyone's spread across both sets of frequencies now ?

Here's what my phone picks up:


3G:

UMTS 2100(Europe and Japan)
HSDPA 2100 (Europe and Japan) (next generation 3G

GSM 850 (North America)
GSM 900 (Europe)
GSM 1800 (Europe)
GSM 1900(North America)
GPRS and EDGE

The current deployment of 3G services in Europe and Japan is quite standardised as UMTS 2100, marketed as 3GSM which uses WCDMA with a 2110-2200Mhz downlink and a 1885-2025Mhz uplink.

The European 3GSM spec, has a full backwards compatibility with existing GSM services, so handsets will fall back onto 2G networks where 3G is unavailable.

Japanese handsets have similar backwards compatibility with older Japanese 2G networks.

UMTS/3GSM allows roaming between Europe and Japan for the first time too, but only using 3G services as there are no existing GSM networks in Japan.

As 3G handsets replace existing 2G models, EU networks will have the option of opening up 900Mhz and 1800Mhz UMTS services and reducing capacity on 2G GSM. The plan is that ultimately, 2G services can be phased out completely, although there's no clear time scale to when this will happen just yet. It's likely that some 2G spectrum will remain on air for quite a while to come.

However, the US allocations are really strange quite odd and incompatible and likely to cause issues for roaming, even nationally within the US.

Frequencies allocated in the US:
1710-1755Mhz + 2110-2155Mhz
Also, it's sharing space with GSM and CDMA in the 850Mhz and 1900Mhz slots with no defined uplink or downlink frequencies on some networks

The FCC's history with licensing mobile spectrum is pretty poor to be honest. They seem to have caused chaos during the initial digital rollouts for GSM/CDMA in the 90s and now seem to be doing the same with 3G services.

Telstra in Australia's also allocated 850Mhz UMTS. Again, I am not sure what the logic of this is..

It's a shame really, as cooperation between Europe and Japan has meant that all the countries using standard European style GSM (i.e. most of the planet) and Japan now have standardised network interfaces. While the US/Canada and a few other places are once again coming up with a strange tweaked version of the global standard.

There's no particular technical advantage to the European/Japanese solution but, it makes life a LOT easier for end users and handset manufacturers if things are kept standardised.

Only the two oldest U.K. networks -- Vodafone and O2 (originally BT Cellnet) -- use 900, but both now also supplement coverage with 1800.

T-Mobile (originally Mercury's One2One) and Orange were only ever licensed for 1800 and still have no 900 coverage whatsoever. The same goes for the new batch of networks which have started to appear in the last couple of years -- 1800 and 3G/2100 only.

Oh, and apparently O2 is now merging with the Spanish Telefonica. It's getting harder and harder to keep up!

O2 was acquired outright by Telefonica in 2006. They opted not to change O2 branding, but have actually expanded it by rebranding most of their other companies in Northern and Eastern Europe, including landline operations in some countries.

All they've done in recent months was rename Telefonica O2 Europe Plc as Telefonica Europe Plc, the consumer products will remain branded as O2. The company is a a wholly-owned subsidiary of Telefónica S.A (Spain).

They will bring the Telefonica identity to the fore a little more, it has been a footnote until this point.
The main reason for this is to show that you can internationally roam on Telefonica owned networks at lower prices.

In Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries, they've maintained their MoviStar branding for mobile operations and Telefonica for fixed line.

Telefonica's actually now the 3rd largest telco on the planet with revenues of about €56.4 billion (US$88.78 billion).