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AT&T Wireless Network Is Open Too
narramissic writes "Following last week's much-heralded announcement that Verizon Wireless would open up its network, AT&T is making it known that its wireless network is also open to outside devices. 'By its nature, GSM technology is open,' said Michael Coe, an AT&T spokesman. 'Customers could always use GSM phones not sold by AT&T on our network. We can't guarantee the performance of the device, of course.' AT&T will start to publicize that information through salespeople at AT&T stores, Ralph de la Vega, CEO of the company's wireless business, told USA Today."
Now if I could just change that SIM card in my iPhone...
Oh...wait.
Customers could always use GSM phones not sold by AT&T on our network. We can't guarantee the performance of the device, of course.
I assume they mean those with a roaming agreement, right and even then there might only be one roaming slot open for data services in any given area. Plenty of times I've been geocaching with a friend in some Cingular/AT&T area and one of us would have GPRS data on our T-mobile Sidekick and the other would not. I'd have to disable/enable the radio in one unit at a time to gain GPRS.
So yeah, guaranteeing the performance of the device might entail not having data at all.
Why, our networks are also completely open to the NSA as well.
AT&T followed up the statement with:
We enjoy so much freedom it's almost sickening. We're free to choose which hand our sex-monitoring chip is implanted in. And if we don't want to pay our taxes, why, we're free to spend a weekend with the Pain Monster.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The thing that always drove me nuts was that they lock their phones up.
For other devices, "we will unlock the device when customers fulfill their contract; we will also unlock the device if the customer pays full price for the device," he said. "The iPhone, however, is an exception. The iPhone is exclusive to AT&T in the U.S."
Translation: Yeah, yeah openness or whatever the buzzword is, but we still gotta turn a profit. If it's any consolation I hear they are really easy to unlock on your own.
I don't blame AT&T. Apple signed the agreement and now AT&T is due their profits. However, it is quite a marvel to see the dustorm Google kicked up. Competition, when you can get it, is a powerful thing.
I got a catholic block.
I couldn't even get a phone locked to the OLD ATT (ATT Blue, for those counting) unlocked by them to work on the NEW ATT (formerly called ATT Orange, or Cingular). It was a phone I bought FROM THEM, and that I'd been using for three years. I liked it. It had long battery life and was sturdy.
I just wanted to change my plan (I was LONG out of contract) and to use the same phone with the new plan. They refused, and even told me to go to "one of those stores at the mall" and pay to have it unlocked. I very kindly told them what they could do with themselves, and switched carriers.
Open my foot.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
As much as Google gets skewered for not living it's motto of "do no evil" and some of the questionable privacy practices of the company, I LOVE what their android/spectrum bid announcements have done to the cellphone industry. The existing giants seem to be falling over themselves to show how customer-friendly, competition friendly, ect. they are. It's really laughable.
Fixed that one...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Pretty much any phone is only defined by whether its based of the CDMA type techs or the GSM type techs, and regardless of who the carrier is, the phone will work. The thing is salespeople have been trained for years to rebut requests to do so with lines concerning it being "unsupported" or to just simply start with "its not a phone for our network". On the CDMA side of things a least, if you have the lock codes, you can activate it anywhere. I do not know GSM too well myself, but i believe billing and account compatibility is all in the Sim CARD is it, which is standardized across all GSM phones?
Why are we praising them for announcing what is open, when the reason no one knew before was their deceitful practices?
Ice Cream has no bones.
I never really liked many of the phones that AT&T/Cingular/whatever sells in their stores. The last three or four phones I've owned I've always bought from places other than AT&T and I've never had any problems with them. One big reason I do this is because I want a GSM phone that will work outside the US. I recently went to New Zealand and Australia, and if I had an AT&T provided phone it wouldn't have worked down there. My current phone, a Motorola V360, worked great down there with local SIM cards I bought. I always make sure I get a quad-band GSM phone for this specific reason.
The only real advantage to buying a phone from a carrier is that it'll come fully configured to operate on their network. When I buy non-branded phones I have to set them up myself. It's basically entering information for voicemil access, WAP gateway, and similar things. It's easy enough to find out most of this information though. Just do a quick Google search of your carrier & phone and you'll probably find numerous forum posts describing how to do it.
AT&T Customer service will submit an unlock request if you meet two criteria:
-You have been a customer for 90+ days
-You have no outstanding issues with your account
I met both of those criteria, said I was going to Italy, and requested "subsidy unlock" codes for 4 phones. 1 week later, four emails and voice mails, completely free and easy. All the phones worked (I couldn't test one, I didn't have a second 3G SIM to test with).
It's not that hard, but you have to ask nicely, correctly, and meet the criteria.
is still too low when it comes to roaming services and customer care. If they actually were a little more friendly when a customer comes in and wants a certain service (like buying a prepaid WITHOUT a phone) they would get a lot more credit on friendliness.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
AT&T's network is GSM, any unlocked GSM device can be used on it. But access to the network must still be purchased. Android is geared toward creating standard, open devices. That's two different things. AT&T is trying to cash in on buzz for "open" but as far as I can tell, there's not good reason Android and GSM are incompatible.
Knowing that the AT&T network was GSM, I bought a relative a nice GSM phone. After all the expense (including a two year contract where I purchased the phone), he did not end up using it. Why? Because AT&T refused to enable GPRS for his phone even when he called customer service.
So, yes, the network can use GSM, but do not get a phone with any features because AT&T will not let you use them.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
T-Mobile has been doing that for years. The thing is, as another user pointed out, there is no guarantee that one of $carrier's branded phones will actually work, but speaking for t-mo, their tier 3 department seems to have some pretty decent tools to make it work. Some things don't work much of the time for non-branded phones (like downloading content from their internal wap site), but otherwise things tend to work.
This sig no verb.
Well I thought this was the case about a year ago. I had an old unlocked T-68i that was originally on T-mobile. My company had switched to ATT and I had switched and gotten a new phone, a T637. The only problem is, I had lost this phone, and my company was unable to get me a new phone for over 2 weeks. (Corp accounts have to go through a different service, can't use stores). Anyhow, I went to an ATT store and asked them if they could just sell me a sim and activate it in my T68i for the next few weeks until I got my new phone. No matter how many times I asked, they wouldn't do it. They would only activate a SIM for a phone I purchased through them. They kept giving me FUD about how the old phone "might not work", etc.. but in reality I suspect that the sale guy wouldn't get his bonus if they sold me just a SIM. So much for GSM portability.. in theory it works, but someone should tell their sales reps!
How do I sign up? I imagine there are mass quantity of hallucinogenics involved in the procedure, and I'm all for that.
Slow news day..... This is atleast 3 days old now.
This is a plain PR release to attempt to on up Verizons PR release. There is no different between the ATT today and the ATT prior to the PR release. They have always had an open network, the ATT platform is another story, its pretty closed (ATT platform == ATT customized firmwares and such), and they love to exclude wireless if they can, and generally refuse to unlock the phones they sell, unless you beg.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
I'm not going to beat the horse I killed in the Verizon thread last week (or was it the week before?) but suffice it to say that I won't be using AT&T ever again if I can in any way help it. I'd link to a comment or two there but I can't find the story, let alone comments.
I'm looking to US Cellular, any thoughts on that?
-mcgrew
Today's journal is NSFW
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Take a look at Joel Spolsky's "Strategy Letter V": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
668: Neighbour of the Beast
If a phone was not in Sprint's whitelist they would NOT activate it. Missed the "not". :)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The story I mentioned in the above comment was linked from this story. here is the comment, if you're interested (score:100% overrated)
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I know from experience as I have used non-Cingular/AT&T devices for a few years now. Most recently is the Sony Ericsson K790a, soon to be the K850i. And they are VERY quick to blame any problems on your device.
In particular, the Blogger function of the K790a is not working for me anymore. Blogger says it's my carrier, AT&T says it's Sony Ericsson's fault, and they won't help me to even troubleshoot to provide info to SE since it's not one of their phones.
My next step is to lie to them and say it's a phone which runs the same OS just to get some help.
I keep a Cingular-branded T637 on hand so when I have problems I can swap back to it and prove that the issue is not my phone. They'll support that even though I bought it on eBay. It just has to be Cingular/AT&T branded. I went through that with my voice mail during the Cingular-to-AT&T transition, during which my voice mail would ring and never pick up or be busy. This made me miss a good number of customer calls. FRUSTRATING.
Tmobile has a policy of allowing you to use the GSM phone of your choice on their network. (And yes, I found it in writing on their web site.) And they don't make any effort to prevent you from installing stuff on the phones they sell. This has been true since way back when I signed up with Omnipoint 8 years ago, and then Voicestream, now Tmobile.
I've been surprised that these announcements by Verizon and AT&T have been getting any attention, since this is seriously old news to me.
What you are talking about is whether or not you have ACCESS to the network. Obviously, you need to somehow PAY AT&T to get access to the network.
What AT&T (and Verizon) are saying is that they will make it possible to use devices on their network. Currently, Verizon is very restrictive about what devices can work on their network. Basically, you MUST buy your phone from Verizon and it MUST be one of the phones they authorize.
In the case of AT&T you were always able to buy another GSM device and put your AT&T SIM card into the device and use their network. My girlfriend uses a 5 year-old Nokia that she bought on-line from a European cell company. You can't buy the phone in the US. But it works just fine... with T-Mobile and now to AT&T (we switched since I got an iPhone).
Obviously you have to pay to use the network (as in roaming, you are paying your carrier and they are paying AT&T for allowing you to roam onto their network). Just because they limit the number of available slots for roamers doesn't mean they are "closed" to the devices.
It's two different issues.
While AT&T allows any device to be used, they won't give you a break on the service price even though you they don't have to 'recoup the cost of the hardware'. When I went into an AT&T store two months ago they said that the only benefit I would see by purchasing my device elsewhere was to cut the contract length from 2 years to 1 year. If I use my own hardware, I don't see why they should need anything more than a valid credit card for which to reliably bill me for service. The telephone and cable companies don't require contracts for service!
Of course, they also have prepaid plans, but a monthly plan with more peak minutes than I'd ever use is the only way to get the free nights/weekends that I do use.
For the record, I ended up leaving Verizon for Unicel and love the service, the price, the plan features (free incoming calls and texts), and they don't do any locking of hardware at all. Now if only we can prevent Verizon from buying Unicel...
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
What's so special about free incoming calls and texts (SMS)? It's quite normal around here, I think nobody would buy paying for incoming calls here.
That's because you're too busy paying three times as much for your outgoing calls.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
...who anxiously await the release of OpenMoko's unlocked phone. I can't wait to get my hands on a Neo, now that I know networks in the US will support it. Who wants an iPhone tied to AT&T, when you can have a phone that runs on all GSM networks and runs Linux?
Fear the penguin.
Its also common to have national plans where you aren't charged differently for calling close by or several thousand miles, unlike land-lines which generally have free incoming calls and differential pricing of outgoing calls depending on distance/region. As well, free night/weekend calling is common on most mobile plans, but not with land-lines.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
This applies to devices they sell too, voice or data. GSM is supposed to work better than that. I'm so happy to be an ex-Cingular (now AT&T) GSM voice customer.
# Worst network ever.
Interesting
I pay 0$ for incoming calls, I pay 0$ in subscription fee, I payed 0$ in start-up fee and I pay 0$ for the first 142 minutes and 99 sms every month.
I do pay a lot for everything over those limits. However I have yet to go above the monthly free min/sms. So far the only thing I have paid for is the phone itself. How cheap are your outgoing calls?
In my case, the min above the 142, is 1,5 NOK per min, that is 0,27249 US$ acording to Google. I could get a subscription that I pay from the first min, (0$ in monthly fixed subscription fees) those would cost 0,1071794 US$ for per minute.
Please tell me what is the "normal" rate in the US.
People here praise Verizon for "opening" up their handsets, but lambast ATT for operating with any GSM device that works in their spectrum. It's reminds me of when Red Hat moved to RHEL, they got all this bad press, but when Sun releases OpenSolaris, along with the paid version they've always had, they're heralded as a leader in FOSS. Personally (I hate to say this) I agree with ATT. I've stayed with them, refusing to buy a device that was under complete control of the carrier. I've always had the ability to use buy a guaranteed non crippled device direct from a handset vendor outside my contract, or use another member of my family's phone if mine went bust (with all my contacts right there on SIM). Meanwhile Verizon has the audacity to charge my friend $15 to transfer his numbers after he buys a phone FROM THEM (because there is no other choice). I could never give up GSM flexibility. I realize that it's just human nature to compare things to the past history, but the GSM providers, TMobile, ATT, Sprit (I think) have always been a better choice.
Well, either there are undisclosed costs or this is a marketing tactic based on the assumptuion that you are going to use a lot more than 142 minutes per month. Either way that's not telling us too much about the overall market.
What you need to look at is the total cost paid by all phone users for incoming and outgoing minutes.
I don't know; I live in Malaysia. My outgoing rate to all US phones is US$0.05/minute, to Norwegian mobiles it's US$0.28/minute.
To get a sense of the variable component of calls from a carrier's perspective, have a look at some wholesale rates. In general, the less efficient (or aggressively regulated) the market, the higher the rates will be. In some cases (e.g., remote Pacific islands) the rates may simply be a reflection of actual transport costs rather than the factors at play in more typical markets.
The fact that termination rates for mobiles in the US are close to zero indicates that carriers have the latitude to bring their marginal usage charge close to zero as well, something that Norwegian carriers cannot do (as evidenced by your rates that - taken as a mean per-minute charge - go up rather than down as you use the phone more).
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Get a prepaid phone. Transplant the SIM card from your prepaid phone to the phone you want to use.
This news, along with recent news about Verizon opening their network, and about Google bidding for the 700 Mhz spectrum, not to mention the announcement of Android and the Open Handset Alliance, all sounds very promising. However, does anyone have any ideas how (if at all) this will affect the Canadian wireless market? I recently moved back to Canuckistan after living in the States for a number of years so I have first hand experience with wireless carriers in both countries. I can tell you that wireless service up here is at least an order of magnitude suckier than it is in the US. I'm crossing my fingers that these changes in US wireless will trickle down to the Canadian market, but I'm not sure how it would.
I don't have a home phone, so over the past six months I've averaged just over 400minutes on the phone each month with a max of 540 minutes, about half incoming and half outgoing. As well, about half is on nights and weekends, and half is during peak hours.
Since none of the prepaid SIM cards I've found provide free incoming calls or free off-peak, I'd be billed for every one of the 400minutes. At the best rate I've seen ($0.10/min) that would work out to $40-$55/month, more than any "plan".
If incoming calls were free with prepaid SIM cards in the US, then prepaid would be much more attractive.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
Of course, they also have prepaid plans, but a monthly plan with more peak minutes than I'd ever use is the only way to get the free nights/weekends that I do use.
Actually, at&t does have an unlimited nights and weekends plan. They offer two types of prepaid:
Pay-Go: Typical prepaid setup
Pick your plan: More like a typical service plan, but without a contract/commitment/credit check. The highest tier of the 'pick your plan' prepaid does unlimited nights and minutes without a contract as well as unlimited mobile to mobile.
About two years ago, I bought a pre-paid SIM card to use on my (then T-Mobile) phone, to figure out if it got better reception with AT&T. I was most of the way through the activation process, but the AT&T operator refused to activate the SIM card unless it was on a supported device. While I was giving the operator a lecture about how I had bought SIM cards to use in this phone in perhaps 20 countries, and nobody ever asked me for my phone model, she hanged up on me. I returned the SIM card and stayed with T-Mobile; much later, I found out that AT&T did in fact have better reception in my home.....
Not locked huh?
Well just ask Verizon why you can't transfer files using OBX (bluetooth) then?
Oh, cause they disable OBX file transfers thats why.
Verizon cripples the software on their phones. Just go to PhoneScoop.com, look up your phone and see what features are disabled. You might just be shocked.
And when will they ever get a calendar app that works? Allows trnsfers to others, and my pc/yahoo account?
They Live, We Sleep
Right now, I'm using an AT&T SIMM card with a gray market import from Asia....
This is one reason why I would not consider switching to Verizon. Even when the third-party devices do come out, they'll still have to pay licensing fees to Verizon anyway.
The US mobile market is too screwed up. The fact that I buy my phones from 3rd world Asian countries so that they'll be cheaper is kind of messed up. Even if you buy direct from the vendor, you still pay extortionate fees, and many of the good models are exclusively through one carrier or another, whereas the equivalent model from the gray market is much cheaper, even after markup from the place importing them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I couldn't even get a phone locked to the OLD ATT (ATT Blue, for those counting) unlocked by them to work on the NEW ATT
What's wrong with what they told you? You can have your phone unlocked at the mall. AT&T probably doesn't even know how to unlock an old model.
When AT&T says that their networks are open, it means that you can use unlocked devices on their network. And you can: I've been doing that for years, and it works like a charm.
I very kindly told them what they could do with themselves, and switched carriers.
Don't let the door hit you in the back on the way out.
When I worked at a radioshack, Cingular/AT&T were hard to get approved for, but they were generally cool with things, even the rare 3rd party support.
However, Sprint, a CDMA based network, the rep got very VERY violent when I asked him about potential customers that could bring in an unlocked 3rd party phone. He threatened me with my job.
But basically, Sprint's policy is this with 3rd party phones:
Deny the potential customer, we don't want them if they dont use our (shitty) phones!
Try to coerce them and convince them to get rid of their unlocked phone, stating that it's illegal to have.
Push one of the phones that we sell to them instead.
Tell them the device is banned from the network.
etc.
Sprint's set up also didnt allow for service plans to be sold without a new phone that they and they alone own.
So in this case, I'd give AT&T some credit, though the training for AT&T is much the same "Deny that you can have the phone access the network, that it's impossible, etc"
they actually make more money selling the phones with the plan than otherwise, even the "free phones"
what's stupid is, even if you dont buy a certain phone, the rate is the same. so it doesnt matter.