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Even if it was never prosecuted, carriers can make it a royal pain in the ass to use devices not sold by them by refusing to activate them, make their devices n
by mahyarm 13y ago
Even if it was never prosecuted, carriers can make it a royal pain in the ass to use devices not sold by them by refusing to activate them, make their devices not even accept SIM cards for the devices, never sell SIM cards and only let preregistered IMEIs from devices sold by them to use their network. That was the Telus & Bell Mobility CDMA carriers back when I was in Canada, and it probably can still be like that.
- gergles 13y agoThat's Verizon and Sprint. The phones are mutually compatible but are unusable on the other network because they refuse to activate phones they didn't sell.
- chimeracoder 13y agoThis is one of the nice things about GSM (as opposed to CDMA, which Verizon/Sprint use). GSM carriers can't block you from transferring SIM cards from one phone to another. It's for this reason that people had iPhones on T-Mobile long before the iPhone was officially available on T-Mobile.
- gergles 13y agoWell, they could stop you if they really wanted; they could IMEI sniff. AT&T does it to detect "smartphones" so they can helpfully add 'mandatory services' to your plan without your consent - it'd be easy for T-Mobile to block Apple's IMEI ranges from registering on the network regardless of whether your SIM worked or not. The FCC should have implemented some actual common carrier regulations/a Carterfone-equivalent for the mobile industry. Instead, they're so mired in regulatory capture we get nothing.