Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
Actually, what happens is carriers "certify" phones to work on their network. YOu may wonder why you can buy Model X of a phone, and find that it doesn't have features while other Model X's do. Some of these features include things like call timers (carriers disable them since they like to charge from the moment you hit Send, rather than the moment the call is actually connected), byte timers (carriers can charge for every byte, including OTA packet headers and such), button color (the Send and End keys *MUST* be of a certain shade of green and red...), and so on.
But what they mean is that since it isn't tested by them, if you call customer service saying your phone doesn't work, they'll say "too bad, so sad". By its nature, GSM carriers cannot test every phone that appears on its network, and in any complex spec, there's bound to be areas where things don't work. Like taking a tri-band phone into a place only serviced by 850MHz GSM.
As for roaming - carriers are stupid if they don't allow people to roam. Roaming is a huge profit center for a carrier. (What, you think it really costs them 5 cents to transfer 1000 bytes of data?).
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.
Not exactly. In order to provision a CDMA phone the carrier needs to put the ESN of the phone on your account. They can easily refuse to complete an ESN change if the new ESN represents an unapproved phone model.
With GSM you don't need to involve the carrier to switch phones. All you do is move your SIM card. The only provision on GSM for blocking phones that I'm aware of is the ability to use the IMEI Database to blacklist certain IMEIs, typically those belonging to stolen phones. In theory, if your phone is reported stolen it will be added to this blacklist and become a brick unless the IMEI is changed. In practice, not all carriers honor this database.
I wonder if the carriers will be nice enough to let us bring our own phones (presumably paying full price for them and avoiding any carrier subsidy) and get service under the same terms as anybody else, but without a long term contract with ETF? Somehow I kind of doubt it -- wonder what the justification for contracts will be when people pay full price for the phone?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"On the CDMA side of things a least, if you have the lock codes, you can activate it anywhere."
Not true. Even if you have the MSL code to unlock programming, Sprint always had an ESN whitelist. If a phone was not in that list, they would activate it. Sprint also MSL-locked all their phones with random codes (stored in a database so only they could activate them, of course.)
Verizon, on the other hand, used an MSL lock code of 0000 on ALL phones. Didn't matter since Sprint would refuse to activate them. If you could get the MSL unlock code for a Sprint device and change it to 0000, you could activate Sprint phones on VZW though - for the 6-9 month gap between Sprint releasing the Treo 650 and Verizon releasing it, this is how VZW customers got Treo 650s. (Although I hear VZW may have started ESN whitelisting policies too sometime since 2005.)
A general thing with CDMA devices is that your account is tied to your phone's ESN. To change devices, you must activate the new device with your provider, deactivating the old one. (There is a standard for SIMs for cdmaOne/CDMA2000 devices, but I have yet to see a phone that used this, at least not in the U.S.)
You are correct in that all account/billing/identification info for GSM phones is stored in the SIM. It is indeed standardized. If a phone supports the GSM bands used in the U.S. (they differ from Europe, but quad-band GSM phones are the norm and not the exception nowadays, especially for higher-end devices.), you can just pop in a U.S. SIM and go. The one exception is that phones can be locked to only accept SIMs from one carrier, so you need an unlocked phone if you want to use a device not sold by the carrier. Examples of phones not sold by any U.S. GSM provider but usable on the U.S. GSM networks include the HTC Advantage, HTC S710, HTC S730, and some of the GSM HTC Touch variants. (Although older Touches were only triband GSM, same for the 710 I think.)
Note here that while the phones sold may not be open (may be locked), the network NEVER locks out particular devices (at least I have never heard of such a thing happening.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I call BS. First of all, you don't enable access for the phone. There is no filtering based on your IMEI or any such nonsense. It is enabled in the HLR, and guess what? EVERYONE has access to the wap.cingular APN regardless of their plan unless they specifically ask for it to be disabled. You say you got locked in or 'he' got locked in or something to an agreement. If you got a 2 year agreement on an AT&T Wireless/Cingular Wireless/ATT Mobility phone, you can damned well be sure that the apn/wapgw/homepage/mmsc settings were preconfigured. Data drives revenue (kb usage, ringtones, downloadables etc).
A simple google search would have told you all you need to know about setting up your phone for data usage. Since you're obviously too lazy, let me tell you how now:
Configure the data connection:
APN: wap.cingular
User: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Pass: CINGULAR1
Wap Gateway:
IP Address: 66.209.11.32
Home Page Url: http://device.home/
ever since AT&T had a GSM network (before Cingular bought AT&T Wireless, before SBC bought AT&T, before AT&T bought SBC, before Cingular changed its name to AT&T) you could use any GSM phone on their network.
I think I should point out again that in the rest of the world, carriers do not do this kind of stupid stuff.
This is an example, it's a mobile device designed entirely by a network operator. None of this slap-windows-mobile-on-it rubbish, this is a BREW based handset (running the MSM6280). All the features and functionality have been explicity detailed, designed and managed by O2 .. and guess what?
Only in the USA do carriers have such a massive control over their phones. This is a prime example of a device which could have been massively crippled from birth - but the operator deliberately chose not to.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I think what they mean by 'open' is that any AT&T customer with an unlocked GSM phone can use that phone on the AT&T network. Which is true; I could take an AT&T SIM and put it into my unlocked O2 Xda IIs, and be online with AT&T just fine. This is true of any GSM network by definition, which I think was AT&T's point.
Verizon's making a big fuss about 'okay, we are going to let people use phones they DIDN'T BUY FROM US on our network! WOW!' And AT&T's response is, 'Congratulations, welcome to the world of things GSM customers take for granted.' (Which, yes, is a little silly that GSM networks will make a deal about how you can use phones they didn't sell you on their networks, but will lock down any phones they do sell you so you cannot use them on other networks.)
Roaming for customers of other networks is a whole different -- and often, more depressing -- story.
--Rachel