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The New Wireless Wars

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the always-declaring-war dept.

An anonymous reader writes "BusinessWeek has a story on the coming wireless wars. It's a look at how the upcoming government auction of wireless spectrum will open the door to a new crop of competitors. The new players, from Google and Microsoft to Intel and Craig McCaw's Clearwire, will compete in new wireless voice services and in wireless broadband. Look out Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint-Nextel."

2 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Details from FCC on AWS-1 by martyb · · Score: 5, Informative
    Here are some links with details from the FCC on Auction 66 aka Advanced Wireless Services (AWS-1):

    Auction 66 Summary Page

    Auction 66 Fact Sheet (Lots of details on this page if you scroll down).

    NOTE: These are not virgin frequencies; some relocation of existing users' bandwith is required in order to free up these frequencies. See the Fact Sheet for details.

  2. Re:One can hope... by karmatic · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh, you can already do it, if you are willing to spend some time, efford, and/or money.

    I bought a T-Mobile MDA yesterday (without a contract). I'm a cingular user.

    A few minutes on xda-developers, and I had a utility to remove the SIM lock, and the CID (bootloader) lock. Flashed the cingular firmware on it, and I was good to go.

    I also unlocked my cingular treos (one I got from ebay), and flashed them with a customized version of the generic GSM firmware. No annoying carrier customizations, and I had a rock-solid, unlocked phone.

    T-Mobile and Cingular don't lock their SIMs, so you are free to use any compatible phone you can get. Their phones can almost all be unlocked, and if you don't take the $150 subsidy in exchange for the phone, they will give you the unlock code. T-Mobile will give you the code on a subsidized phone after 3 months; I had no problem getting Cingular to give me unlock codes the day after activation (that was a business acct, FWIW).

    You want beligerant, try Verizon. I had terminated the contract (and paid the fee to cover the subsidy) with Sprint, and had a free CDMA phone, which supported E911 and all other required technology. I flashed it with the stock Verizon firmware. It had Verizon firmware, settings, the works. They still wouldn't take it. Verizon will not take phones they didn't sell.

    Sprint had no problem activating a ex-verizon phone for me, however. Go figure.