[LINK] Wireless Oligopoly Is Smother of Invention

[Scott Howard]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 6:25 PM, Ivan Trundle <ivan at itrundle.com> wrote:

> Having said all that, there are MANY phones which are effectively unlocked
> from a particular carrier in the US, and a whole army of people dedicated to
> unlocking a huge range of handsets.
>

Getting a little off topic, but...

The locked/unlocked concept is far less of an issue in the US than it is in
Australia.

The reason being that the two major carriers in the US (Verizon and AT&T)
run completely different and incompatible network - AT&T is GSM-based (GSM,
EDGE, UTMS, HSDPA, etc) whilst Verizon is CDMA (1x, EV-DO, etc).  Even when
you add in the smaller networks of T-Mobile (GSM) and Sprint (CDMA) there's
little compatibility between the providers - in most areas T-mobile coverage
(in particular, 3G coverage) is on different frequencies to AT&T, and most
phones do not support both. CDMA on the whole doesn't lend itself for
migration between providers, and thus moving Verizon/Sprint means a new
phone.

Whilst there is definitely a sub-culture of unlocking GSM phones in the US,
in my experience it's far more related to people wanting to use phones
overseas with local SIMs to avoid roaming charges, and only rarely for
people moving between networks.

In my own first-hand experience, both AT&T (post-paid contract) and T-Mobile
(pre-paid) were happy to provide unlock codes for my phones - in both cases
I think I had to have owned the phone for 3 months and still be an active
customer, but that was pretty much all.  The only reason I bothered
unlocking them was so that they could both be used in Australia.

  Scott.