Saturday, February 05, 2005

GSM cell phone and International Roaming

International roaming is expen$ive these days. For example, if I were to travel to western Europe and use a Cingular cell phone right now, I would have to pay $1.29 per minute + long distance + tax. Most people would suggest buying a GSM cell phone and switch to the foreign country's GSM SIM card when traveling. Unfortunately, the cell phones that we bought from our wireless carrier are already locked to their frequencies. There is a way to get around this: to unlock the cell phones. For example, there are plenty of information on the web for unlocking Nokia cell phones. The legal background of unlocking has also been discussed thoroughly. It seems the actual unlock process takes less than 5 minutes (provided you read all the instructions first). However, if you hit the wrong button, this could be a long/painful process. So read all the information before unlocking.

Publication update (TCS + ASP-DAC)

Updated my homepage with two papers published in Asia South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), which was held in January 2005. Also updated the homepage with a link to my journal paper for Theoretical Computer Science.