Slashdot Mirror
Why Unlocked Phones Don't Work In the US
schnell writes "Unlocked cellular devices have long been a part of the wireless landscape in Europe and elsewhere. But longtime industry analyst Andrew Seybold explains why that model doesn't work in the US due to technology and frequency differences, and why LTE adoption may not make things any better."
Other than Apple who is not using the micro USB interface these days?
Except that these barriers are all really nothing more than a chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody builds a phone that can do all the HSDPA bands, but that's not because it's hard. The only customers who care about the 1700 MHz band are in the U.S. and Canada on carriers that don't sell unlocked phones, and there are no laws requiring unlocking. As a result, those customers don't expect to be able to move from one carrier to another without unlocking. As a result, the handset manufacturers don't need to build phones that allow this. As a result, the chipset vendors largely haven't bothered to design the chips to make this possible.
If you can build a 5-band handset, a 6-band handset is really only incrementally harder. Even a 12-band handset is only incrementally harder when you factor in electronically tunable antennas into the mix.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The main point of the article should have been that the EU created a competitive landscape by restricting competitors to interoperability standards that do not exist in the USA - i.e. allowing customers to go from carrier to carrier without the need for a new phone. Here in the US, you are automatically subsidizing a new phone when you sign up for service with any major wireless company - and if you don't use the subsidy by buying a new phone every two years, then you're leaving money on the table. Yes, a waste, but that's what evolved over here vs. the general EU model of the customer providing the phone and the carrier supplying the SIM (though subsidized plans exist).
Me, I'd prefer the ability to switch carriers and not to have this hidden subsidy. If the phone works and you're happy with it, why quasi-require the owner to chuck it for a new model? Just more e-waste with no tangible benefit except for those that like to further line the pockets of wireless carriers through the use of additional (previously unreachable) services. I also like that the EU mandates that the caller to the cell pays for the call. Seriously cuts down spam calls - because calls to cell phones are 5x more expensive than landline calls. An additional benefit is the possibility of giving a phone to your kid and being able to call them at will - but they cannot make calls unless they refill the SIM bank account.
Anyhow, IIRC, the iPhone 4 has two external antennas that are nominally tuned to certain frequencies but which through some electronic happiness inside can actually cover a wider variety of frequencies than the one that they are 'naturally' resonant on. So your signal quality on a 700MHz band using a nominal 850MHz antenna may not be great, but it may still work. The current iPhone 4 is capable of handling signals ranging from 850MHz-2.4GHz... so the current design limitations may be just that, limits by design to lock folk into AT&T in the US market. Then again, I don't know enough about all the technologies, compatibility issues, etc. to say for sure that it can be done.
There's a bit more to it than that. If you travel in Europe for business, you're going to be visiting different countries. They're all on the same GSM standard, but roaming and out-of-network rates have traditionally been extortionate.
When I lived there in the late '90s, early '00s, I knew plenty of people who carried multiple phones -- one with their primary number, another with their 'other network' number, and sometimes a third that they could swap pay-as-you-go cards into when travelling.
When I lived in Slovakia there were two carriers, one owned by Orange the other by DT (later T-Mobile). All outgoing calls were metered. Calls in-network were reasonable but out of network -- i.e. from Slovak T-Mobile to Slovak Orange, cost something like five times as much. Calls elsewhere in the EU could approach 20 times as much.
The carriers didn't want to sell unlocked phones, but that's what people demanded. Generally you couldn't buy an unlocked phone from a carrier, but if you already had one, they were happy to sell you a SIM.
Everybody age 16 to 25 either could unlock a phone themselves or knew someone who could. Everyone knew someone that age. Also, most people who wanted one bought an unlocked phone from sources other than the carriers.
Plus, it was much more common for people to buy the phone and use a pay-as-you-go service rather than get a subsidized phone as part of a fixed contract.
The carriers wanted a long-term plan system like exists here but the market wasn't interested, for many reasons including those mentioned above.
But if it cost a US user 20x as much to call someone in another state, things might have worked out differently.
It would be interesting if the cell phone manufacturers offered a swappable, standardized radio module that would pop in and out like the battery.
It would be much more interesting, and much less expensive, pose no unresolved technical challenges, if the shared-majority wireless operators in the US (Sprint, Verizon), would just use an existing swappable, standardised user identity module, like R-UIM cards. However, they are too concerned with fighting each other to realise that their technology has already lost, due to not being viable in other countries (where R-UIM is a requirement, but all decent phones are made for Sprint and Verizon, almost exclusively without R-UIM support). Not separating the number from the phone makes it too much of a hassle for users to switch phones, sell used phones, travel without roaming etc. (and of course, switching networks, which is what they are actually after, but damaging the whole CDMA market in the process), which are all trivially possible with GSM.
Maybe they could allow roaming to more than just a handful of international CDMA operators. For example, there are multiple CDMA operators in many African countries, (including some that have tens of thousands of US citizens working in them), but not one is supported for roaming by Verizon or Sprint. Verizon seems to have more limited roaming than the cheapest crappiest GSM operators, and Sprint mostly provides roaming via GSM operators (so, if you travel, you already need a dual-tech phone, or two phones, why not just use GSM all the time?).
Huawei (who makes a lot of CDMA-based gear, both telco-side and handsets, mostly for China Telecom I guess) has a nice article covering the issues with CDMA roaming. Most of them are due to "American mindset" that is inherent in CDMA and CDMA deployments. Of course, Huawei is punting their solutions to these problems, but waiting for all CDMA operators to refresh their kit will make you old.
Also, maybe if CDMA operators had consistent international dialing/number representation formats (like the +XX convention used by all GSM operators), users would figure out how to actually make international calls via CDMA. But, who needs numbers that don't start with a "1" anyway ...
That way you could buy an expensive smartphone, and leverage that investment by just picking up a new radio module to move to a new network.
At the moment, 52% of US subscribers can't even move between operators that use the *same* baseband modules (vs less than 15% worldwide). Maybe you should try and solve that problem first.