Re: ppp support naming

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 13:55 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 08:56 +0100, Will Stephenson wrote:
> > On Monday 03 March 2008 19:38:23 Tambet Ingo wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 12:18 PM, Vitja Makarov <vitja makarov gmail com> 
> > wrote:
> > > >  I see it in the tree but I don't see it works, correct me if i'm wrong.
> > >
> > > It works for GSM and CDMA.
> > 
> > As far as I know, GSM and CDMA are instances of certain classes of cellular 
> > networks, but GSM and CDMA themselves are not used globally.  
> > 
> > If I 'm right in this, it would make sense to internally name this support 
> > something generic, like 2GCellular and 3GCellular and then the GUI can sort 
> > out whether it refers to it as "CDMA" in EN_us or "3G" in EN_gb or "UMTS" in 
> > de.  The flipside is users doing a "CDMA wtf?" when they try to use their 
> > cellular card.
> 
> Just a quick point; _nothing_ should ever use or expose the 2G/3G/4G
> names anywhere to the user.  Those classifications are pretty loose and
> essentially meaningless.  Are we going to expose EDGE cards as "2.5G"
> instead of 2G?  Are we going to expose CDMA2000 1x as "2.5G"?  No.  But
> they aren't 2G or 3G either.  This classification just breaks down.

As an example of the stupidity here, T-Mobile has an "Internet 4G"
service that uses TD-CDMA on the air interface but is really 3G in it's
speed classification, it's comparable to HSUPA+HSDPA which nobody would
call 4G.  The card is provided by IPWireless and is branded "4G"; a
driver for it just hit the kernel too.  The "G" classification scheme
just doesn't work.

Dan

> They are all "Mobile Broadband".  I purposely didn't use "cellular"
> anywhere because even though that's technically what it is, that term is
> only used in the US.  I'm not going to use "mobile phone" anywhere
> either, because everyone in the use uses "cellphone" or "cell".
> 
> Where possible, we should display model and manufacturer strings in the
> UI because people usually know they have a Nokia or an LG or a Samsung
> phone.  They don't care if they have a Nokia CDMA phone or a Nokia GSM
> phone.  It's a phone.
> 
> Dan
> 
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