foothead
Omnicide now.
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I wonder whether this would be an illegal route for emergency call reasons. In the UK at least, you can place a 999 call on any network free of charge, which makes sense. Arbitrarily cut this down and you could sensibly claim companies are forfeiting emergency service coverage, which may not be currently illegal but I'd imagine (hope) would be a bigger incentive to ban this workaround too.
Moreover, I'd hope the law would come in the form of it being illegal for service providers to lock phones, rather than it being legal for us to unlock them (or both of course.) If they only support specific frequencies, this is still a prime example of locking, just on a lower level (locking at the physical hardware rather than the software / driver layer.)
It definitely isn't illegal as they've been doing it already. If you buy a sprint phone, it's basically unusable on any network other than sprint. The rest generally have some intercompatibility, but it's not going to support all of the different systems the other carriers have. So you might be able to use an AT&T phone on tmobile, but it'll only work on GPRS and EDGE, not 3G.
Interesting thoughts there berry120. While your phone can scan all of the 800 band phone channels locking it to just a handful of channels would be troublesome to say the least.
Say you buy a phone in Atlanta that is lock to channel cluster A. You go to a small town like where I am in hicksville USA. Channel cluster A is not implemented here so your phone is useless. There was actually a small phone company that did just that. Your phone only worked in a tiny service footprint. They went the way of the dodo thank goodness. I had one of those suckers and damn near lost the job I had at the time cause my boss couldn't get a hold of me.
I would venture that locking a phone to a set cluster of freqs would involve buying the rights to that cluster from the government office in charge. That would be the FCC here in the colonies. If companies did manage to pull that off the exclusivity of it all would be outrageously high in cost due to having to reprogram ALL cell service equipment.
But knowing those dorks at AT$T they'd do it just to keep other companies from being able to use those channels. I'd put a rider on the contract from the FCC saying you have use them in X amount of time or they go back up for grabs.
Hopefully that idea stays cost prohibitive even for the big boys.
I highly doubt they'd even try to get exclusive rights, if that were even possible. It's just something that would naturally happen. And phones are often locked to specific frequencies. My Dell Streak that I used to have didn't support any of T mobile's 3g frequencies but it had all of AT&T's.
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