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CRTC Bans Locked Phones and Carrier Unlocking Fees (mobilesyrup.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Canada's telecom regulator has announced that as of December 1st, 2017, all individual and small business wireless consumers will have the right to have their mobile devices unlocked free of charge upon request, while all newly purchased devices must be provided unlocked from that day forward. The decision came following the February 2017 review of the Wireless Code, where unlocking fees took center stage, with some parties (like Freedom Mobile) advocating for the abolishing of those fees altogether, some arguing they should remain as an important theft deterrent and the CRTC suggesting the fee should be far under the current $50 CAD standard. "The Wireless Code has helped make the wireless market more dynamic to the benefit of Canadians. While they appreciate the Code, they told us loudly and clearly that it could be more effective," said Jean-Pierre Blais, chairman of the CRTC, in a press release.
The Fuck are you talking about?!
CDMA is shortly going to be gone at least within the US since both major CDMA carriers have opted to take the LTE route.
As for the GSM carriers (read UMTS) and the US using different frequencies than the rest of the world. This is nothing short of bollocks. The frequencies allocated differ all over the world. There is no "this is the frequency used in the US and this is the frequency used in the rest of the world" standard. If you get a quad band phone however, you should be set in about 80% of the world, the US included. But frequencies are allocated basically where ever there's room in the spectrum. There is no standard for frequency allocation.
Nearly all implementations of the data service in GSM 3G (UMTS, HSDPA) is wideband CDMA.
CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. GSM was designed (by committee) to use TDMA - each phone takes turns communicating with the tower. That was OK for voice, but absolutely destroyed data bandwidth because each phone got an equal slice of the bandwidth even if it didn't need it. CDMA allows every phone to transmit simultaneously, and the tower distinguishes them because each phone uses orthogonal codes. Kinda like two people writing on the same sheet of paper, one vertically, one horizontally. CDMA interprets other devices transmissions as an increase in the noise floor (decrease in signal to noise ratio), so each phone's bandwidth scales automatically. If 10 phones are transmitting simultaneously, each phone gets 1/t0h the bandwidth. If only one phone is transmitting, the noise floor is lower and it gets all the bandwidth.
This is why CDMA carriers rolled out 3G data a year before GSM. The U.S. allowed both standards to compete, and CDMA absolutely destroyed GSM in data service. GSM threw in the towel and licensed CDMA from Qualcomm, and needed the extra year to come up with the specs and hardware. This is also why 3G GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time. They had a TDMA radio for voice, and a wCDMA radio for data. CDMA phones had only one radio, and it could only be used for voice or data, not both simultaneously.
CDMA for voice is used mainly in only the U.S. But if the U.S. had gone along with GSM, our data speeds today would probably be around 300 kbps - 1 Mbps. And LTE probably wouldn't exist. Most implementations of LTE use OFDMA - orthogonal frequencies as opposed to orthogonal codes in CDMA. CDMA served as the proof of theory that this crazy orthogonal signaling stuff really did work when scaled up to the size of a nationwide network. Without that proof, people wouldn't have been willing to put in the time and money into developing LTE. (OFDMA requires more processing to extricate the orthogonal signals than CDMA. Up until about 2010, the processors needed for OFDMA used too much power to be of practical use in a device designed to operate for at least 12 hours on battery. My old Galaxy S supported Sprint's WiMAX which was also OFDMA, and it would only last about 4 hours if I was using WiMAX.)
The time-limited nature of TDMA is also why GSM coverage is worse in rural areas. Because the timeslices are synchronized and a constant length, each TDMA tower's range is limited by the speed of light multiplied by the duration of the timeslice (IIRC this is about 35 km). CDMA has no such restrictions, so in a wide-open rural area with little noise and few obstructions, a single CDMA tower can cover a lot more area than a GSM TDMA tower. TDMA was just a bad idea overall, and it was stupid for GSM to standardize on it.