Random Chit Chat - Page 1726

foothead · 03-06-2013, 07:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by berry120

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by setishock

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.

**berry120** · 03-06-2013, 08:08 AM

Quote:

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.

Hmm, interesting. Perhaps that's a US thing, I haven't seen any companies in the UK go to that trouble to stop you from switching (at least not yet. I hope we haven't got it coming.)

XPikachu · 03-06-2013, 07:10 PM

Just thought I'd share one of my many drawings with the CF community.

setishock · 03-07-2013, 12:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by berry120

Hmm, interesting. Perhaps that's a US thing, I haven't seen any companies in the UK go to that trouble to stop you from switching (at least not yet. I hope we haven't got it coming.)

Just quoting to pick back up on this subject.
Check out the ad for this cell phone. > https://www.pricegrabber.com/user_sa...8941509&domain[0]=yahooshopping
Close to 800 US dollars for this unlocked phone.
I wonder if unlocked phones are going to be this outragiously priced just to keep us from buying then? Or in this case does that moron selling that thing really think he's going to get that much for it?

foothead · 03-07-2013, 05:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by setishock

Just quoting to pick back up on this subject.
Check out the ad for this cell phone. > https://www.pricegrabber.com/user_sa...8941509&domain[0]=yahooshopping
Close to 800 US dollars for this unlocked phone.
I wonder if unlocked phones are going to be this outragiously priced just to keep us from buying then? Or in this case does that moron selling that thing really think he's going to get that much for it?

That phone is quite old and pretty worthless now. But high end phones commonly run $600-700 if they aren't subsidized by your carrier.

jmacavali · 03-07-2013, 06:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by foothead

That phone is quite old and pretty worthless now. But high end phones commonly run $600-700 if they aren't subsidized by your carrier.

Or more...

foothead · 03-07-2013, 08:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmacavali

Or more...

iPhone 5 is $650 retail in the US. It seems people are importing them from other countries and selling for extra.

If you really want an unlocked iPhone, the way to do it is go to whatever carrier you have and buy the phone outright, no contract. You then call customer service and you can get them to unlock it for you. The instructions for AT&T can be found here. Other networks are pretty similar from my understanding. It's complicated, but this is the best way to do it for now.

jmacavali · 03-07-2013, 08:44 AM

I'll just pay the $200 and get locked into a 2 year contract. Verizon is solid in my area and I can't justify paying $650 for a phone. I have a hard time paying the $200 for it but that's the way it works and we have to play along.

My next upgrade is later this year in October I think. Maybe switching to Windows Phone or a high-end Android, depending on whats available then.

BK_123 · 03-07-2013, 05:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by foothead

iPhone 5 is $650 retail in the US. It seems people are importing them from other countries and selling for extra.

In Australia to buy them outright one store is charging $789AUD for iPhone 5 and for the 4S $679 outright.

setishock · 03-07-2013, 05:16 PM

Jeeze that's outrageous. I'll stick to my little LG pay as you go phone. Or better yet my government subsidized phone is free. 280 free anywhere minutes per month. If I didn't need the LG for the job I wouldn't have a cell phone.