U.S. Mobile Phone Carrier Practices Questioned

Wow the iPhone is changing the way our telecommunication network will be setup in the future. Awesome!

interesting. It will be a long time until you see laws passed on this. It somehow reminds me of the original deregulation of the phone monopoly that was the Bell System (ma bell) back in the day.

^ Actually, the shady practices of cell phone carriers are causing this. The iPhone was one of many examples.

is this saying that all phones should be able to be used on whichever network one may choose? ..so like iPhone will be able to be used elsewhere from att?

Verizon needs to do the CDMA EVDO to HSDPA upgrade. This kind of network changeover has successfully been done in South Korea and Australia.

HSDPA has a very large range of devices and has designed-in interoperability (SIM cards).

The Telstra changeover in Australia concurrently allows people to use HSDPA phones and CDMA phones until all customers have changed over - both standards concurrently sharing the same spectrum. It also uses the same frequency band as the US versions of these standards (850MHz)

The Australian example took 10 months to complete from concept to completion.

An unexpected side effect was greatly increased coverage footprint (98.6% Australian population) and higher than expected data rates.

People are finally starting to wake up! :rolleyes:

I hope this means that Stinkular can shove it very soon and Apple can put there phone on more worthy networks. The fact that they don't offer insurance for the their phones is keeping a lot of people on my side of town from getting on.

um. no. free enterprise allows carriers to sign exclusive contracts. maybe other countries will allow laws to pass that tell companies they need to open their products but here in the US, that isnt how things work.

Unless it is a monopoly (which this isnt), they cannot tell Apple the product needs to work on all networks. Apple for example could create their own wireless service and make it exclusive to that. They are selling a product, they can limit it as much as they like. People do not need to buy it, nor do they need to use AT&T. There are plunty of other phones and plunty of other carriers out there. No part of this is a monopoly. Except for the fact that AT&T has a monopoly on the iPhone (but no more than any football team has on a player... it is called a contract). If you don't like it than move on, nothing to see here.

Verizon needs to do the CDMA EVDO to HSDPA upgrade. This kind of network changeover has successfully been done in South Korea and Australia.

HSDPA has a very large range of devices and has designed-in interoperability (SIM cards).

The Telstra changeover in Australia concurrently allows people to use HSDPA phones and CDMA phones until all customers have changed over - both standards concurrently sharing the same spectrum. It also uses the same frequency band as the US versions of these standards (850MHz)

The Australian example took 10 months to complete from concept to completion.

An unexpected side effect was greatly increased coverage footprint (98.6% Australian population) and higher than expected data rates.

There is absolutely no way Verizon would change over from CDMA to GSM. It would require way too many resources as well as a very large chunk of change to covert all their towers to GSM. You have to take into fact that Verizon is a very greedy company and CDMA is working just fine.

I must admit, I like the CDMA networks very much because it handles traffic very well and voice quality is very good. I've never used GSM, but another thing would be building penetration. From reports I've seen, GSM has poor building penetration compared to CDMA.

The U.S. telecommunication systems are totally messed up. CDMA sucks but they have a much larger EVDO network compared to AT&T's HSPDA network. There needs to be one network with super fast data network. Unfortunately that costs money and I don't think any of the huge corps are down for spending any of it.