Sprint will unlock cell phones
Sprint Nextel announced today that they’ll provide customers with the necessary codes to unlock their cell phones if a proposed settlement for a California class action lawsuit goes ahead.
Any phone you buy directly from a U.S. carrier will come "locked" to that provider. My AT&T locked phone will only work with AT&T and not T-Mobile. Unlocked phones don’t have the settings tying them to a specific carrier. Locked phones dominate the U.S. market but lately consumers are getting testy about the restrictions.
Unlocking cell phones is hot news since Apple’s decision not to let customers modify their iPhones so that they can work on other networks besides AT&T. Two separate lawsuits were filed recently against AT&T and Apple Inc., saying the companies’ restrictions amount to unfair business practices.
Apple estimates that 250,000 iPhones were sold to people who had the intention of unlocking the handsets so that they could be used with wireless providers other than AT&T. Those unlocks were made by hackers who cracked Apple's stopgap measures to enable use outside AT&T under subsequent iPhone firmware revisions.
The suit filed against Sprint last year alleged that phone locking is anticompetitive. Because a locked phone can’t be used to make calls once a customer leaves a carrier, you can’t take your favorite phone to a new carrier unless it is unlocked. Since unlocking requires a code, U.S. customers are forced to buy a new phone when they sign up for new service plan.
Sprint's momentous decision could start a major shift in the U.S. market, especially if other carriers follow suit. it could cause a huge shift in how cell phones are used here. It’s mostly good news for consumers, but because Sprint uses CDMA technology, only phones that use CDMA will work on the Sprint networks. Verizon, Alltel and US Cellular all use CDMA. Conversely, the Sprint CDMA phones won’t work on AT&T or or T-Mobile, who still use the old GSM technology.
The Sprint move won’t do much good till other carriers agree to play ball. Even if another carrier uses CDMA, the carrier would have to agree to activate the phone for you because CDMA phones don’t use SIM cards. It will be interested to see what happens and who the winners and losers will be.
Comments
Anonymous
October 26, 2007
Sprint Nextel announced today that they’ll provide customers with the necessary codes to unlock theirAnonymous
November 01, 2007
I received this comment in email from Douglas: Want to correct a couple of items in the news story. CDMA (a Technology for multiplexing multiple phones on on a channel) is a very old technology. used during ww2 at first (as a way to foil jamming. and to better effect during the vietnam war. It is also used in GPS systems before qualcomm patented the technologies and released it for cell phones. GSM didn't have access to CDMA when it was formed in 86, and used TDMA (technology) as a basis for the 2nd gen service (1st gen being Analog) GSM is a entire suite of technologies. It should be noted that 3rd gen GSM is based on CDMA though. UMTS, HSPDA etc are all based on cdma. although those cdma specs are not compatable with the qualcomm cdma technologies primarily used only in the US. in comparison to world usage. the CDMA phone used in the US is about 12% of the world phone usage, even GSM 3rd Gen has a larger installed based world wide than the CDMA used in the US. One of the reasons that CDMA phones are usually more expensive the corresponding GSM phones. So quick break down. Verizon, altell, sprint (and may not be fully compatable on other cdma networks sprint at one time was and I believe is still single frequency, may be dual freqency now with the aquisition of nextel (sprint started service as a pcs company which was the 1900 MHz range)) all use quallcom CDMA technologies. IS95 AT&T nee cingular was a TDMA platform, when time for upgrades were needed they decided to go with the world standard GSM. GSM has had several standard upgrades. but 2g was based on TDMA so moving from an Propiertery tdma platform to the GSM standard made since. 3G GSM is moving to CDMA on the encoding technologies though. so a UMTS handset in areas where UMTS is implemented will be cdma on voice and Data. this is an ITU implementation of CDMA and not compatable with the Qualcom technologies. T mobile is a PCS company as it was Voicestream before it that. it is a single frequency company at 1900 MHz, and most if not all phones are single frequency. Unlocking a T mobile phone in most cases will fail to work on ATT network as ATT is a conglameration of baby bells and former pcs companies. and require phones that operate on 850 (about 80% of the network) and 1900 Mhz. T mobile won an auction last year and will be building their WCDMA+hsdpa in that area. (in the 1700 MHz range) (aka UMTS or gsm 3g) ATT won some in that range although they havn't announced plans I wouldn't be surprised if they bring out handsets in that range also. and probably pure UMTS handsets. oh the poor world of controled technolgies of the cell phone industry. Glad I don't work in that area anymore. Would like to see what happens in Europe happen in the US. Buy a sim card for a certain amount of mins. buy any cell phone at cost and use sims from the service provider you want. of course that means that we would need phones that are dual technology and quint frequency to be useable world wide;) douglas