GSM Phones North America

As I explained in previous posts, I am a refugee from Reddit, and this community is intended to be a refugee shelter for those whose beloved home country is /r/vintagemobilephones community on that big scary site. As explained in my last post, I was never banned by VMP subreddit mods, from what I can tell those mods were just as appreciative and supportive of my on-topic relevant content as the rest of that community - but Reddit site-wide admins inserted themselves as an insurmountable barrier between me and my native community.

So why did I not name this RetroLemmy community "vintagemobilephones" just like the one on Reddit? Answer: because neither I nor A2GC own that name. I am not the original founder of /r/vintagemobilephones, nor was I ever a member of its mod team - instead I was just a prominent technical contributor without any ownership stake. As of this writing, I do not yet have any way to contact any of the mods of that subreddit - hence I have no way of knowing if they even know what happened, and if they do, how they feel about it. Thus it would be wrong for me (or for A2GC as a company) to claim to be a successor to /r/vintagemobilephones on Reddit without having even spoken to any of the mods of the original community.

I thought about naming this community after A2GC, but then decided against it. A2GC seeks to become a small regional cellular operator in some of the more remote and rural locations in USA, and once we build out as such, we will stand on equals with AT&T, T-Mobile, Viaero Wireless, Union Telephone, GCI Alaska and so forth. It is clearly not appropriate to require a customer relation (or being a "customer in waiting", anxiously awaiting promised network build-out) for someone to be interested in Vintage Mobile Phones - hence the community needs a name that conveys a more expansive scope than just A2GC.

Then come some practical limits on my area of expertise. It is my understanding that anyone who creates a new community is expected to moderate it, and I do not feel qualified to moderate in areas that are outside of my expertise, both technical and geopolitical:

1. In technical terms, GSM is not the only "retro" cellular phone technology for which Vintage Mobile Phones were made - far from it. Just in terms of "2G" technologies alone, GSM fiercely competed with CDMA and iDEN in its heyday, then there are "1G" analog technologies such as AMPS, C-Netz and NMT, and then there is a "1.5G" transitional technology as in D-AMPS or "TDMA" as it was called in North America. All of these technologies have their own devotees, each of them is beloved to some people, and all of them were represented in the original Reddit community. Yet out of these technologies, the only one in which I consider myself an expert is GSM.
2. Why North America, why not just USA or in the opposite direction, the whole world? When it comes to Vintage Mobile Phones, different frequency bands were adopted by EU and USA, and then by other countries that followed these two different leads. All of Eurasia and many other parts of the world (with which I have very limited familiarity) eventually adopted GSM frequency bands that were originally defined/invented by some regulators somewhere in EU, while Federal Communications Commission in USA defined a different set of frequency bands for early cellular networks in USA. Canada and Mexico copied these frequency definitions from USA FCC, and thus all of North America became technologically harmonized when it comes to early (1G and 2G) cellular systems - but EU and most of the rest of the world harmonized on a different standard.

Newer phones, including late 2G era, were made triband or quadband, covering both geopolitical regions - but all early GSM/2G phones were made for one region only, either for EU-led world or for North America. While many of the same companies made "parallel" models for the two markets, differing only in frequency bands, once there are two different physical variants being made, other differences inevitably crept in. Hence Vintage GSM phones made for North American market constitute their own category, distinct from early GSM phones in EU.

Now on to practical matters: while I consider myself an expert only on North American GSM phones and not any other category of Vintage Mobile Phones, this community is a refuge for anyone who has been wronged by Reddit in one way or another, and anyone who would like to stand in fellowship with those of us wrongfully banned from that site. Therefore, if you would like to post some interesting content about Vintage Mobile Phone technologies other than GSM, or VMP topics or issues or concerns that exist geographically outside of North America, please feel welcome to post or comment! Maybe some day the original founders of /r/vintagemobilephones will create a properly blessed mirror community here, or maybe someone else will step in - but until then, please use this rule of thumb: anything that would be welcome in /r/vintagemobilephones on Reddit is also welcome here.