Good point. I guess I did not read the fine print on that. But come to think of it, this has been a problem with CDMA phones as long as they've existed. As far as I know, it's pretty hard to buy an unlocked CDMA phone and use it with a different carrier than the one who sold it. I know some people who used to offer a service where they actually flashed the chips on a Verizon CDMA phone to allow for it to be used with Sprint. It was a lot more complicated than the relatively simple unlocking that can be done to a GSM phone to make it work with another GSM carrier. Even jailbreaking an iPhone is not overly complicated these days, and according to the law, it's not illegal. Carriers just want to be dicks.

With that said, I wonder why Sprint or Verizon wouldn't accept an unlocked phone. I wonder if it is a limitation of CDMA that makes it overly complicated. I know for a fact that both AT&T and T-Mobile are more than happy to sell me a SIM card when I walk in with an unlocked phone, and judging from the fine print on Apple's page, it seems it might be more of a technical limitation of CDMA, instead of the carriers not wanting to sell service to someone.

In most other countries, this is how it is - the phone is separate from the carrier.

Currently, most GSM phones are sold as quad-band phones, meaning they support four different frequencies of GSM, and therefore, support just about every carrier that uses GSM. Even if there are a handful of different frequencies, the underlying LTE technology is the same, so let's hope that it will be like GSM, where we see "quad-band LTE" or however many bands there end up being in use across the world.

I'm excited with the developments in LTE, because it's nice to see that all carriers in the USA will eventually be supporting the same standard. For far too long in the states we've had so much confusion and complication because of CDMA vs GSM. I'm glad that the CDMA carriers (Verizon and Sprint) are finally upgrading to a better standard.

I'm dreaming of a future where the USA will be like the rest of the world, where we'll be able to buy an unlocked phone, and use it on any carrier we chose. I'm currently using an unlocked phone, but my choice in carriers is limited to just AT&T (being as T-Mobile doesn't cover here). It's still cheaper, if you buy an unlocked phone, and then get a prepaid SIM card. Life would be so much simpler if all the carriers supported one standard, and an LTE phone would work with any network.

It might be Apple that pushes us to this point. As they've repeatadly shown, they prefer to only build one model of phone. The iPhone finally got a CDMA variant last year, but this year, it's all one model again, because they found a chip that supports both CDMA and GSM, as well as all 3g frequencies. Apple wants to build an LTE phone, and all carriers want to have it, and Apple will not want to build two different LTE phones. Meaning we'll get one LTE phone, and as LTE is backwards compatible with GSM, it requires a SIM card. When they do that, and other manufactures start doing it, we'll see an era where it might just be possible to buy an unlocked phone in the USA, and be able to buy a SIM card from any network you want to use.

This is my dream, but I'm thinking there has to be a catch. Why would the carriers want this kind of arrangement? They want to be able to lock people in, because they don't want to compete based just on who has the best service / price. But maybe, this is just an inconvenient fact for them, as the rest of the world moved on and developed standards, and in our global world, it just doesn't make sense to have your own proprietary standards anymore. CDMA is dying, and now so is WiMax. Both standards were only used by a few carriers, manufacturing phones and equipment to support them was more expensive just based on economies of scale, and they were unfriendly for the consumer. GSM is vastly more consumer friendly than CDMA, in terms of convenience and customer choice.

So, does the USA finally enter the 21st century, and have mobile phone systems that don't confuse the rest of the world?

I guess I should have qualified that last statement by poing out that she is Russian.

From the perspective of an American, I'm always amazed when I go to other countries, carrying my unlocked phone. When I arrive, I'm greeted in the airport by a number of various phone companies, who are all more than happy to sell my a SIM card. For my first overseas trip, I learned about the number of options for using mobile phones, and I was so amazed that all the carriers seemed to use similar standards and frequencies. Before this, I had the typical American attitude that every phone had to be used with a certain carrier, that one couldn't just get an unlocked phone and use it on any network.

Having come back to the USA, I've decided to adopt this practice for myself, buying unlocked phones online, and using them with either AT&T or T-Mobile. ATT has gotten much better about their pre-paid plans lately. I love their $50 unlimited pre-paid plan. They didn't hassle me at all the last time I went in, I just told them I wanted a SIM card, and they didn't even ask to see the phone. They just pulled out a SIM card, sold it to me, and told me that if I wanted to use it in a smartphone, I'd need to buy a data package for it. So for $50 plus data, you're still beating their price for what a similar unlimited plan would be on contract. T-Mobile was always good about selling me a SIM card, but I found on their prepaid plans, there are a lot of places where data won't work. I live in a fairly rural area, and it seems that ATT has much better coverage. T-Mobile will roam on ATT for voice, and if you are on contract, I believe they will let you roam data too (but only on Edge), but on prepaid, if there isn't a T-Mobile tower in range, you won't get any data.

So this merger is not good for me. I wish that America was more like the rest of the world, where I would have at least three robust GSM networks to choose from for my unlocked phone. Right now, I only have two choices, and where I live one of the choices isn't really an option if I want data. I think the presence of T-Mobile, and their easy pre-paid and no-contract plans has at least caused ATT to offer a similar service, I'm afraid that if there's only one network, we'll lose that competitiveness. I would say there's probably only a small amount of people in the USA who do what I do, and buy unlocked phones and then shop for service. If theres only one GSM carrier, then whatever small incentive there was for ATT to offer a decent no-contract plan for users like me, will disappear.

And I'm not convinced we can blame it all on the carriers, much of it has to do with the uneducated American consumers, who don't even know that in most of the world, you can buy the phone you want, and use it on any network. If consumers realized that this was possible, more people would start buying phones this way, and carriers would respond by offering more options for people who want to buy SIM cards and go no-contract.

I have my fingers crossed that LTE can maybe improve the situation a little bit. If both Verizon and AT&T start using LTE, then I'm hoping that we'll be able to unlock LTE phones, and be able to get an LTE SIM card from either Verizon, or AT&T. If you've seen a new Verizon phone that supports LTE, and open it up, you'll see a surprise - a Verizon SIM card. In the future, I'm hoping that all carriers will start selling LTE SIM cards, and we'll be able to buy unlocked LTE phones and shop around for a carrier. I think that's how it should be - pick the phone you want, and then shop for the carrier that meets your needs best.

Just a funny anecdote to finish up my point. My non-American girlfriend recently arrived, and I gave her an AT&T SIM card to use in her Nokia she brought with her. I arrived home from work one day, and found my Verizon Droid that I'm no longer using completely dismantled on the table. I asked her why she tore apart my Droid, and she said, "I wanted to try this phone, and I can't figure out where the SIM card goes in here, they hid it really good!" I then explained that not all American phones take SIM cards, and that phones are usually bought from the carrier on contract and can't be moved to another network, and some networks don't use SIM cards and don't all support the same standards. She muttered something about "dumb Americans..."

Sounds like where I work. Do we work at the same company? I don't like naming where I work.. but sounds familiar!

I'm sitting two floors above a call center, with several hundred agents, who are all Americans and speak English as their first language, in addition to a couple who speak Spanish. We're a major internet and catalog retailer, and we haven't outsourced our call centers on purpose, because we find in our business we need to have good customer service, or we lose our customers. I used to work in that call center that I'm sitting above, when I couldn't find a job in IT immediately after I graduated. Through my hard work, my education, and expertise in computers, I was promoted to a better job. This is how things should be in all companies. At least it still happens some places.

Copying a post of mine from earlier, yes, T-Mobile actually will be compensated quite well for this.

If this deal is blocked, it would not be bad news for T-Mobile as some here have claimed. According to Bloomberg,

"Should regulators reject the deal, which would create the biggest U.S. wireless carrier, AT&T would have to pay Deutsche Telekom $3 billion in cash. It would also provide T-Mobile USA with wireless spectrum in some regions and reduced charges for calls into AT&T’s network, for a total package valued at as much as $7 billion, Deutsche Telekom said this month."

So T-Mobile would get $3 billion in cash, more spectrum, and reduced fees for calls going through AT&T's network. This would seem to be good news for T-Mobile, as all of these things would make them more competitive.

If this deal is blocked, it would not be bad news for T-Mobile as some here have claimed. According to Bloomberg,

"Should regulators reject the deal, which would create the biggest U.S. wireless carrier, AT&T would have to pay Deutsche Telekom $3 billion in cash. It would also provide T-Mobile USA with wireless spectrum in some regions and reduced charges for calls into AT&T’s network, for a total package valued at as much as $7 billion, Deutsche Telekom said this month."

So T-Mobile would get $3 billion in cash, more spectrum, and reduced fees for calls going through AT&T's network. This would seem to be good news for T-Mobile, as all of these things would make them more competitive.

I can already guess what this program is going to look like. In my small city, and many other small towns in the country, a company called Open Range (http://www.openrange.net) has recently been offering Internet service that they brand as "4g". It uses WiMax. One of their flyers was left on my door, offering a free one month trial, so I decided to give it a try, just for the heck of it. They provide a unit that looks like an oversized wireless router, with giant antennas on it. This device recieves the WiMax, and it also has a built in wireless router. They also offer phone service through the unit - it has phone jacks in the back. The internet is $40 a month, and it goes to about $60 if you want the phone service as well. The internet is actually unlimited. But it isn't what I'd consider to be broadband. They claim speeds of up to 4 Mbit. In reality, I found that speed varied quite a bit, depending on time of day mostly. Sometimes it could get very slow. And doing something bandwidth intensive on it would take up so much bandwidth it would significantly slow my browsing even. So in the end, I decided it wasn't for me. There are other options in this city, and I think for the price, DSL would be better. I have cable, and while cable is more expensive, it at least provides an 8 Mbit connection that is always reliably right around it's advertised speed. I believe this company is partially financed by government grants and or low interest government loans. Since we're considered a rural area, it was part of the rural broadband initiative. However, this still doesn't help the people who live outside of my city. This wireless doesn't reach them, the cable company won't run cable out there, and the phone company won't upgrade their lines outside of the city to handle DSL. To top it all off, the cell phone service around here isn't great. In the city (of 20,000 people) AT&T hasn't even yet upgraded to 3g, T-Mobile doesn't offer service, Sprint doesn't either, leaving Verizon the only game in town if you want to use data on a mobile device. Enough whining about my city. Anyways, I fail to see what this will accomplish. All the decent sized towns and cities in America already have choices for internet, which are already better than 4g. Still no one will be covering the really rural folks who live outside of town. So. What does this accomplish? Nothing, really, except to waste more taxpayer money. Maybe the competition will help lower broadband prices? I haven't seen that happen yet in my city, the 4g isn't really priced low enough to bring droves of people away from what they already have. Even if it was dirt cheap, it just isn't fast enough for me anyways.

Living in this state, sometimes I think it would be easier to go back in time to buy liquor. Now if only my dad hadn't sold his DeLorean...