Cheap Used Cell Phones For Sale

Do you want to upgrade your cell phone? Did you break your phone and need a replacement? Did someone steal your phone and leave you incommunicado? Would you just like an extra phone to take to the worksite?

Yes? Well, if you go to the carrier’s cell phone store to get a cheap phone, guess what? The phone may be wireless but it will have lots of strings attached. No way is one of the major carriers just going to hand over an upgrade or replacement phone on the cheap. They’ll put a new contract in front of you and say, “Sign!” Then you get to pick from whatever models they have available.

Don’t want to sign a new contract or you haven’t been on the service long enough to qualify for an upgrade? OK. That just means that you get no deals from the carrier. They’ll ding you full retail price on the phone and it is guaranteed to be an eye-popper. Once you get your breath back, you’ll be happy to sign a new contract, if they even let you, and be thankful you got out of there alive.

Do you find the thought of going through this process revulsive? If so, we’ve got some good news. There’s another place to get cell phones that will work on your current cell phone plan and get them cheap!

What I want to introduce you to is the idea of buying a used cell phone. Don’t think that this necessarily means trolling the auction sites or having to go to somebody’s house to see what they’ve got. I’m talking about an online site that has a huge selection of guaranteed used cell phones ready to use. You get a 100% guarantee that your phone will function perfectly. You also get a free home charger and battery. The phone you pick will be shipped the same day with instructions for how to activate it in minutes. You never have to set foot in the local cell phone store.

Just what kind of shape are these phones in? They are graded into four categories. Refurbished is best. That’s a phone in pristine condition with the manual and box included. It’s almost like a brand new phone but at a deep discount. Excellent phones show very little sign of use. They’re like a new phone once you start carrying it around. Excellent phones come with excellent prices. A Good phone shows normal wear and tear. If your other phone was a bit scratched up or showing wear on the case you may not mind getting another phone in good condition. That’s especially true when the price is so low. Lastly, there are phones in fair condition. These are what you might call beaters. They’ve got a lot of wear showing but they’re still 100% functional. Broken phones just aren’t sold at all.

But just a second. Aren’t used phones just the old dogs nobody wants? Not by a mile. For instance, one used model in excellent condition and available right now to run on your Verizon Wireless service is a Motorola Droid 2 with Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, and a lot more. The cost? A fraction of what you’d expect to pay. There are other Droids available, too. Or you can choose from a huge selection of pre-owned Blackberry devices if that’s your preference.

You are probably wondering how you put these phones into service without having to get a new service plan. If you have a GSM or IDEN carrier (AT&T, T-Mobile, Boost, Nextel) you simply take the SIM card out of your old phone and pop it into your new phone. Voila! Your service is transferred to your new phone automatically. Because the SIM card is what activates the service, you can have a whole collection of cell phones and just move the card from phone to phone any time you want.

If you have a CDMA carrier (Verizon or Sprint) you probably know that there is no SIM card accessible. Instead, you need to call your service provider and give them the electronic serial number of your new phone. It will be written on the activation guide that comes with the phone. Your provider will then enter that number into their system so that your new phone is the one that works with the service. Not as convenient as a SIM card, but you can certainly get your used phone activated without too much muss and fuss.

Here are the carriers that used phones are available for: Alltel, AT&T Wireless, Boost Mobile, Cingular, MetroPCS, Nextel, Sprint PCS, T-Mobile, US Cellular and Verizon.

How about the brands of phones available in the used selection? You can choose from Apple, Blackberry, Casio, Hitachi, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm TREO, Pantech, PCD, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Siemens, Sony, UTStarcom and ZTE.

Interested? If so, take a few minutes right now and browse the current selection of used cell phones. This selection changes continuously, as some phones are sold and other acquisitions take their place. If you see a deal you really like, you best grab it before someone else does. Unlike new phones, there can be only one or a few of any particular model available. First come, first served.

Medical Records Head To The Cloud

It’s been predicted for some time that the medical industry is going to have to move to electronic records soon to have any hope of containing the ongoing cost spiral. That move is now underway. No less than Verizon has built a cloud service to store medical records online. So what is this service and what does it portend for the future?

Verizon Business calls its service The Verizon Health Information Exchange. No snappy acronym there, but it does have a tone of significance. The idea is to store patient records in a standardized format within a Verizon data center. Access will be via the Web. Also, health care providers that subscribe to this service will be able to easily share patient records.

There are several important advances here. Electronic medical records are not new, but there are multiple incompatible formats. That’s the tower-of-babel problem we used to have with computers. The entry of a major service provider like Verizon offers hope that their standards will become industry standards, much the same way as IBM nailed down personal computer standards just because of their sheer size.

Another breakthrough is the adoption of Web-based access. Web browsers have matured as secure portals for shopping, banking and other sensitive applications. Mechanisms, such as encryption, are available to ensure patient privacy. By using a common Web browser instead of a proprietary terminal or software package, users will have an enormous range of options for using this system. That includes PCs and MACs, iPads, mobile phones, and perhaps embedded systems built into medical equipment like scanners or X-ray machines. The mobile opportunity is especially interesting for physicians on-call or out in the boonies.

Another option allows medical providers to keep their records stored locally like they do now, but permit access through the cloud so that other doctor’s offices or hospitals can access those records when needed. This should make it easier for wary medical providers to put a toe in the water before fully committing to send everything to the cloud.

Health care automation and electronic medical records are ushering in a new age of faster and more informed health care. Hopefully, easy access to comprehensive medical information for each patient will help reduce the need for every provider to run the same battery of tests, reducing costs across the board. Before this can happen, though, systems for easy record sharing, like the Verizon Health Information Exchange, will need to proliferate. At the same time, many providers will need to upgrade their access bandwidth so that they can quickly upload and download large files that include detailed images.

4G Wireless Quietly Encroaching on 3G

To hear the cellular carriers describe it, the mobile world is going 3G wireless as the defined cutting edge technology available today. Meanwhile, a competing and faster technology is being slowly deployed, city by city, across the country. What's really going on?

It's actually little more than the usual pattern of technological improvement. It starts with an invention, in this case wireless data service, followed by steady improvements as time goes on. We saw this with the personal computer. Today's PC shares a lot of commonality with the one's of decades ago. You still have a CPU, disk drive, RAM, ROM, monitor, keyboard and mouse. But the speed and capacity of today's machines are orders of magnitude above the best you could buy years ago.

Mobile data is on a similar growth curve. WiFi hotspots are something of a unique product with a very limited coverage area, which is unlikely to change. Wide area mobile service is really the domain of the cellular carriers. By building an extensive network of towers and transmitting stations, they have wide footprint of wireless coverage for telephone calls. Piggybacking a data service on this same infrastructure is a logical and cost effective move.

What started as dial-up speed data service for mobile phones has been steadily improved down two paralleled paths, mirroring the two most popular types of cellular service. CDMA, used by Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Alltel, offers EV-DO and EV-DO Rev. A cellular broadband. GSM, used by AT&T and T-Mobile, offers EDGE and HSPA broadband. The latest incarnations are considered third generation or 3G. Access is now available through many if not most cell phones, wireless aircards used as adaptors for laptop computers, and built into the latest netbook computers.

The 3G services aren't done evolving, but they soon will be. AT&T wants to double it's current 3 Mbps peak speed over the next couple of years. Verizon and Sprint are on a similar upgrade path, perhaps a little faster at deployment.

But one carrier isn't waiting for the 3G marketplace to mature. They're already moving ahead to 4G. That carrier is Sprint, in combination with Clearwire. Since the company carries the Clearwire name, those not watching this closely might not realize that it's related to the competitive cellular business.

The 4G technology is WiMAX, which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. It doesn't interfere with current cellular operations or use the same transmission frequencies. It's being launched in parallel with today's 3G networks. In a few cities you can have your choice of 3G or 4G. Download speeds for the 4G WiMAX service are typically 4 to 6 Mbps with bursts beyond 15 Mbps.

WiMAX also isn't being touted as a cellular technology. There's no cellphone service or handsets. Instead, WiMAX is being offered as a broadband Internet service for home or business, with a mobile service available through plug-in aircards like those used for 3G cellular. You can also get VoIP telephone service bundled, similar to what is offered by cable and telephone companies.

Where is WiMAX 4G service available? It's been deployed in Baltimore, Portland OR, and just recently Atlanta. The plan is also to launch service in Chicago, Charlotte, Dallas / Ft. Worth, Honolulu, Philadelphia and Seattle this year. By the end of 2010, Clearwire expects to be service 80 major cities in the U.S.

AT&T's 4G service will be based on LTE or Long Term Evolution technology. Verizon is planning a similar approach. LTE won't get started for a year or so, but it will follow a similar approach to WiMAX in that it will use different channels than those in use for 3G, so that both 3G and 4G services can exist simultaneously.

There is some thought that once 4G technologies mature, 3G will be phased out. Perhaps the current cell phone technologies will follow suit. The trend is toward converged IP networks for everything. That suggests that VoIP running on 4G networks along with data service on the same channels will be the new wireless communications technology.

Juniper Has Routers For The 100 Gbps WAN

In the ever expanding need for speed, Verizon and Juniper are up to something big. It's 100 Gbps fiber optic connections.

Carriers have been dabbling with 100 Gbps transmission for some time now. It's an order of magnitude above the standard 10 Gbps pipes that are common on long haul networks. There are also 40 Gbps transport systems in use. Now it looks like 100 Gbps is getting ready for deployment. Juniper's contribution is an interface that will handle this bandwidth directly. Currently, carriers have to aggregate multiple links to achieve that speed. Verizon has demonstrated a 111-Gbps channel over 1,040 km.

So, what's all this bandwidth going to be used for? You can pretty much bet it isn't desperately required for telephone calls, email or casual Web browsing. The bandwidth crunch that's upon us is all about video.

If you've ever had the pleasure of editing and exporting movies or other video, you know the feeling of shock and horror that you felt when you first realized that moving and manipulating video files takes minutes and maybe hours, not seconds. I got a taste of it this weekend when I found that the 10 minute movies my digital camera took so easily require long rendering times when you try to do anything with the raw files. For those of us used to working with Web pages, still photos, text and code, the amount of disk space and bandwidth even simple video files can chew up is absolutely astounding.

Now, consider that the entire world is moving not just to video everything but to HD video everything, and you can understand why the telecom carriers and Internet Service Providers tremble at the thought of the Internet going from HTML to HDTV. It's not just an incremental increase in traffic. It's a large and generally unplanned step change.

It's not just Cable broadband and DSL providers that are inundated with video traffic. Wireless carriers are getting their share as the new 3G touchscreen smartphones are bought in significant numbers. Video clips from YouTube just whet the appetite. Now with Slingbox capability on the iPhone as well as laptop computers, people expect to access their satellite receivers and DVRs from anywhere they happen to be. The transition of broadcast TV from analog to digital is truly the tip of the iceberg. The lion's share that's represented by the underwater part of the berg is IP video destined for wireline and wireless broadband transmission.

Little wonder that both WiMAX and LTE networks are going ahead, recession or no recession. Little wonder, too, that Juniper's 100 Gbps is being heralded as not just the solution to today's bandwidth demands, but a stepping stone to Terabit transport channels. Could they be more than a few years away?

Samsung Omnia Smartphone for Smart People

Omnia is defined as the Latin plural of "all." It's an appropriate moniker for a high technology wireless device that has it "all" for mobile professionals.

The Samsung Omnia is first an advanced smartphone based on the Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro operating system. It sports a full HTML Web browser, Opera Mobile, running on a 3.2 inch LCD touch screen. But this is no ordinary PDA style touch screen. It incorporates Samsung TouchWiz technology to provide tactile feedback in the form of a slight vibration. An accelerometer tells the device whether you are in portrait or landscape mode just by rotating the phone.

Does the Omnia sound something like the Apple iPhone or the BlackBerry Storm? It's in that league, but with its own feature set. In addition to the Windows Mobile OS, the Omnia is cellular broadband connected, running on Verizon's EV-DO Rev A network with download speeds up to 3.1 Mbps. You can sync your email over the air with ActiveSync v4.5 and Windows Mobile Device Center. Text messages can be sent to individuals or groups, with 2-way threaded view.

The digital camera that is built into the Samsung Omnia is truly high resolution at 5. 0 Megapixels. You'll take pictures good enough to print or switch to camcorder mode for video capture in a variety of formats. There's also an MP3 player and FM radio onboard. Take advantage of Verizon's VZ Navigator system for directions using the A-GPS support built-in.

What are the hottest cell phone deals available right now, including free cell phones? Use the Cell Phone Plan Finder to check out the top phones and associated wireless service plans.

Cable vs FTTH Bandwidth Throwdown

The battle of the bandwidths has begun in earnest. In one corner, the presumed high speed champion, FTTH (Fiber to the Home). In the opposite corner, the challenger, Cable Broadband. Who will be champion? That's too early to tell. But we know who the real winner is going to be - bandwidth hungry broadband users.

The latest battleground is Washington state. Comcast, the Cable giant, is rolling out 50 Mbps Internet service to compete with Verizon, the telco giant, that offers 50 Mbps FiOS Internet service. FiOS is the name Verizon has given to its PON or Passive Optical Network system that connects homes and businesses to distribution hubs via fiber optic cable. The fiber and its splitters are passive, although you do need a rather large network interface box mounted outside to terminate the cable and convert the pulsating wavelength data back to electrical signals.

So what makes Comcast think that plain old copper coaxial TV cable can take on light powered optical fibers? DOCSIS 3.0, that's what. DOCSIS or Data Over Cable System Interface Specification is the cable modem standard that allows cable system operators to transport data along with TV signals. They do this by setting aside some TV channels for Internet service and using modulation technology to create signals that are compatible with cable channels. The modem takes care of making those signals Ethernet compatible.

From a users perspective, it doesn't matter if the incoming cable is fiber or copper as long as it can handle the needed bandwidth. Ultimately, the user is simply going to connect an RJ-45 plug in the back of whatever interface box is provided.

Just what bandwidth can you squeeze out of cable, anyway? Well, it's a far cry from analog telephone lines. We know how quickly our analog modems topped out at 56 Kbps. That's all there will ever be from that technology. A telephone voice channel just hasn't got any more room to grow. Telephone companies get around that by using frequencies beyond the voice range to deliver DSL over home and business phone lines. But there is a definite speed versus distance tradeoff that limits this technology.

No so much with Cable. Those TV channels can go and go and go. Most Cable companies now use fiber optic transmission for part of the distribution distance. They just haven't gone the extra step of bringing the fiber right to the building, like Verizon has done. For users lucky to get 3 to 6 Mbps on their Cable connections, 50 Mbps may seem a bit fanciful. But they're stuck using older DOCSIS standards that don't bond multiple channels together to create a pipe capable of as much as 400 Mbps.

Wow! Comcast is sitting on 400 Mbps? Well, not so fast. That's an upper limit and could require a huge investment of both equipment and set-aside channels. For now, Comcast is figuring their 50 Mbps "Extreme 50" service will be enough to compete with 50 Mbps FiOS.

We'll see how long that lasts. Verizon is already planning to up the ante to 100 Mbps in the near future.

One thing that doesn't seem to be mentioned in the news about these fantastic broadband speeds is download limits. There's been a lot of hoopla recently as Internet Service Providers, including Comcast, have announced caps on how much data you can download per month before getting kicked off the service. The providers say the limit is set high so that only network abusers will be affected. But that's with the modest bandwidths most of us have available. You have to spend a majority of your time in constant download mode to hit the limits.

What happens as bandwidths exceed 100 Mbps and full-length high definition video downloads become commonplace? Perhaps by then the carriers will have upgraded their network backbones and have auxiliary content delivery networks in place to handle the video load. They'll need to keep on this. After all, the way technology advances we'll be clamoring for Gbps broadband service sooner than any of us expect.