AT&T Wireless Network Is Open Too 122
narramissic writes "Following last week's much-heralded announcement that Verizon Wireless would open up its network, AT&T is making it known that its wireless network is also open to outside devices. 'By its nature, GSM technology is open,' said Michael Coe, an AT&T spokesman. 'Customers could always use GSM phones not sold by AT&T on our network. We can't guarantee the performance of the device, of course.' AT&T will start to publicize that information through salespeople at AT&T stores, Ralph de la Vega, CEO of the company's wireless business, told USA Today."
I suppose... (Score:2)
I assume they mean those with a roaming agreement, right and even then there might only be one roaming slot open for data services in any given area. Plenty of times I've been geocaching with a friend in some Cingular/AT&T area and one of us would have GPRS data on our T-mobile Sidekick and the other would not. I'd have to disable/enable the radio in one unit at a time
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Sprint/Nextel work better when beaten with a 4x4.
Sherm
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You can sign up for an unlimited data plan, but:
-you can't stream music to your phone. Or access the iTunes store from your iPhone. Music bits are different from other bits?
-you can't forward the bits to your computer. Bits destined for your laptop are different from phone bits?
-you can't do VOIP using your phone. Audio bits [again] somehow interfere with phone bits?
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My AT&T phone came with XM Radio streaming software. I can use the included Windows Media Player to stream just about any mp3/wma stream, or download third-party software to do so. And I can download third-party software to stream Sirius if I desire.
Re:I suppose... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, what happens is carriers "certify" phones to work on their network. YOu may wonder why you can buy Model X of a phone, and find that it doesn't have features while other Model X's do. Some of these features include things like call timers (carriers disable them since they like to charge from the moment you hit Send, rather than the moment the call is actually connected), byte timers (carriers can charge for every byte, including OTA packet headers and such), button color (the Send and End keys *MUST* be of a certain shade of green and red...), and so on.
But what they mean is that since it isn't tested by them, if you call customer service saying your phone doesn't work, they'll say "too bad, so sad". By its nature, GSM carriers cannot test every phone that appears on its network, and in any complex spec, there's bound to be areas where things don't work. Like taking a tri-band phone into a place only serviced by 850MHz GSM.
As for roaming - carriers are stupid if they don't allow people to roam. Roaming is a huge profit center for a carrier. (What, you think it really costs them 5 cents to transfer 1000 bytes of data?).
Re:I suppose... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think I should point out again that in the rest of the world, carriers do not do this kind of stupid stuff.
This is an example [o2.co.uk], it's a mobile device designed entirely by a network operator. None of this slap-windows-mobile-on-it rubbish, this is a BREW based handset (running the MSM6280). All the features and functionality have been explicity detailed, designed and managed by O2 .. and guess what?
Only in the USA do carriers have such a massive control over their phones. This is a prime example of a device which could have been massively crippled from birth - but the operator deliberately chose not to.
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I don't think you can blame CDMA for Verizon crippling features on its phones. Sprint uses CDMA too, and it doesn't pull any of the crap that we hear about Verizon.
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But the only reason why they CAN do it is CDMA. You cannot do it with GSM, because the only device directly related to the operator is the SIM card, and not the mobile phone itself. Consumer lock-in is designed into Qualcomm's technology, whereas GSM may have been conceived by various companies with various means and various goals, but enabling competition was a basic principle of the system.
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That makes no sense...you're not saying that all of a GSM cellphone's firmware resides in the SIM, are you? If AT&T, T-Mobile, or whoever can apply a theme to a phone's UI (and they do...my T610 had a magenta-colored theme that screamed "T-Mobile"), there's nothing stopping them from mucking around elsewhere in the phone'
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No, that's not what they meant. What they mean is that you can put an AT&T SIM card into just about any GSM phone and, assuming the frequencies line up, you can use that phone on the AT&T network. I've used many GSM phones on my AT&T account, using my AT&T (ne Cingular ne PacBell Wireless) SIM card, and they just work, regardless of whether AT&T sold the phone or certified the phone.
If the frequencies don't line up, you're out of luck, bu
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nee PacBell nee Bell Telephone nee AT&T =)
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What Verizon said is "any customer of ours will be able to use any device approved by
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you misunderstand the point (Score:2)
What AT&T (and Verizon) are saying is that they will make it possible to use devices on their network. Currently, Verizon is very restrictive about what devices can work on their network. Basically, you MUST buy your phone from Verizon and it MUST be one of the phones they authorize.
In the case of AT&T you were always able to buy another GSM device and
Re:I suppose... (Score:5, Insightful)
Verizon's making a big fuss about 'okay, we are going to let people use phones they DIDN'T BUY FROM US on our network! WOW!' And AT&T's response is, 'Congratulations, welcome to the world of things GSM customers take for granted.' (Which, yes, is a little silly that GSM networks will make a deal about how you can use phones they didn't sell you on their networks, but will lock down any phones they do sell you so you cannot use them on other networks.)
Roaming for customers of other networks is a whole different -- and often, more depressing -- story.
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There are a few ways of using a GSM on a network:
- If your already have an agrement:
- Roaming agreement between the host network and your provider.
- Buying a temporary agreement or a pay as you go and put into your phone. Of course these requires an unblocked phone.
- Buying a unblocked phone off the hi
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CDMA on the other has various levels of incompatibility and in all cases requires a phone call to the operator to get the account switched over to the new phone, even if you are on the same network.
I watched an amusing situation as my roommate tried to change some phones on his Verizon account due to this crap.
He has a friend on his account, and she bought a new phone. He went to get her line switched over to the new phone and somehow the (apparently new) Verizon rep at the store switched things wrong and her new phone got his line, her old phone kept her old line, and his phone lost service. They only tested calling out on the new phone I guess, so he didn't notice this until a few hours later. A
AT&T's freedom (Score:5, Funny)
AT&T followed up the statement with:
We enjoy so much freedom it's almost sickening. We're free to choose which hand our sex-monitoring chip is implanted in. And if we don't want to pay our taxes, why, we're free to spend a weekend with the Pain Monster.
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Cool.....But what about the phones? (Score:1, Offtopic)
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My last two phones have been bought off of eBay, unlocked, with no branding or disabled features of any kind. Both worked without a hitch on AT&T (and Cingular, at that time), though I don't use data services, so I can't speak to that.
As for the phones they sell you, I've heard that if you ask nicely, and have an account history with them, they will unlock your phone for a legitimate reason - e.g., if you are traveling overseas for a few months. Again, I didn't have to do this when I was abroad, since
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Not as long if you are still under contract. I've been with SBMS/Cingular/ATT since 1992, and they refused to unlock my phone for an international trip (so I could use a pre-paid SIM card) because I had 6 months left on my contract.
I should have dumped them at the end of my contract. But, s
AT&T unlocks customers in "good standing" (Score:4, Informative)
-You have been a customer for 90+ days
-You have no outstanding issues with your account
I met both of those criteria, said I was going to Italy, and requested "subsidy unlock" codes for 4 phones. 1 week later, four emails and voice mails, completely free and easy. All the phones worked (I couldn't test one, I didn't have a second 3G SIM to test with).
It's not that hard, but you have to ask nicely, correctly, and meet the criteria.
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So, yeah, they do unlock customers in contract. That won't save you from the ETF though...
The only issue I've heard is that, if you have phone insurance, they might give you trouble unlocking the new phone. They put the old phone on a AT&T blacklist, but I've read that AT&T does not list them on the worldwide IMEI DB blacklist, so
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I don't waste time with the AT&T stores or people, I just move the card over, and continue. Neither of us are real heavy users, so we haven't needed to upgrade our plan other than when we consolidated the
Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
Translation: Yeah, yeah openness or whatever the buzzword is, but we still gotta turn a profit. If it's any consolation I hear they are really easy to unlock on your own.
I don't blame AT&T. Apple signed the agreement and now AT&T is due their profits. However, it is quite a marvel to see the dustorm Google kicked up. Competition, when you can get it, is a powerful thing.
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I call bullsh*t (Score:4, Interesting)
I just wanted to change my plan (I was LONG out of contract) and to use the same phone with the new plan. They refused, and even told me to go to "one of those stores at the mall" and pay to have it unlocked. I very kindly told them what they could do with themselves, and switched carriers.
Open my foot.
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Then you talked to an idiot CSR. I did the same thing about two or three months ago as well. Old blue phone, moving to an orange iPhone plan and wanted to be able to have the old phone as a backup. Call them again.
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Better yet, use the automated online form. That way, there's no potentially incompetent CSR to muck up the works. That's what I did. One week later, I had my unlock code. Unless there's some fundamental technical limitation as other people mentioned, so will you.
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Most of the stores I know would have unlocked the phone for free, but only if your there.
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Interesting information and thanks for it - good to know.
I've had cell service with them (as Cingular) for years, and the home phone has been with SBC on my wife's name. When all of the mergers went through, they offered to merge the bills and reduce the rate by (I believe) $2. BUT: because the phones were set up under two different names, and SBC, AT&T and
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Do some research next time.
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I know what you're talking about, but I'm not talking about that service. My service was definitely GSM, and my phone was also a GSM phone, just locked to the old ATT GSM network. Network incompatibility was not excuse for them
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I see quotes in the article about AT&T unlocking phones for customers out of contract (or paying full price for the phone), I'm not sure if that's a change or "the way it has been", but the t
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Sory - I read that as "unlocking their Tits" and flashed back to the horrors of rear hook bras, and the difficulty removing them in a suave manner.
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bullshit indeed (Score:2)
What's wrong with what they told you? You can have your phone unlocked at the mall. AT&T probably doesn't even know how to unlock an old model.
When AT&T says that their networks are open, it means that you can use unlocked devices on their network. And you can: I've been doing that for years, and it works like a charm.
I very kindly told them what they could do with themselves, a
This is great (Score:1)
Been that way for YEARS (Score:2)
Re:Been that way for YEARS (Score:4, Informative)
Not exactly. In order to provision a CDMA phone the carrier needs to put the ESN [wikipedia.org] of the phone on your account. They can easily refuse to complete an ESN change if the new ESN represents an unapproved phone model.
With GSM you don't need to involve the carrier to switch phones. All you do is move your SIM card. The only provision on GSM for blocking phones that I'm aware of is the ability to use the IMEI Database [gsmworld.com] to blacklist [wikipedia.org] certain IMEIs [wikipedia.org], typically those belonging to stolen phones. In theory, if your phone is reported stolen it will be added to this blacklist and become a brick unless the IMEI is changed. In practice, not all carriers honor this database.
I wonder if the carriers will be nice enough to let us bring our own phones (presumably paying full price for them and avoiding any carrier subsidy) and get service under the same terms as anybody else, but without a long term contract with ETF? Somehow I kind of doubt it -- wonder what the justification for contracts will be when people pay full price for the phone?
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T-Mobile has an option called FlexPay [t-mobile.com], which provides for almost all of the advantages of post-paid service, without needing a contract (if you pay full price for the phone).
They are the only (major) American carrier with anything like this though and that's a crying shame IMHO. Why the hell do I need to be locked into a contract for the benefit of having phone service? And don't anybody come back and say "prepaid" as an option -- most American prepaid plans are a joke for anything over and above "keepin
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If I recall correctly, Verizon and Sprint (both CDMA tech) use different megahertz frequencies. So the phone also has to be capable of operating at both frequencies.
- Saj
Re:Been that way for YEARS (Score:4, Informative)
Not true. Even if you have the MSL code to unlock programming, Sprint always had an ESN whitelist. If a phone was not in that list, they would activate it. Sprint also MSL-locked all their phones with random codes (stored in a database so only they could activate them, of course.)
Verizon, on the other hand, used an MSL lock code of 0000 on ALL phones. Didn't matter since Sprint would refuse to activate them. If you could get the MSL unlock code for a Sprint device and change it to 0000, you could activate Sprint phones on VZW though - for the 6-9 month gap between Sprint releasing the Treo 650 and Verizon releasing it, this is how VZW customers got Treo 650s. (Although I hear VZW may have started ESN whitelisting policies too sometime since 2005.)
A general thing with CDMA devices is that your account is tied to your phone's ESN. To change devices, you must activate the new device with your provider, deactivating the old one. (There is a standard for SIMs for cdmaOne/CDMA2000 devices, but I have yet to see a phone that used this, at least not in the U.S.)
You are correct in that all account/billing/identification info for GSM phones is stored in the SIM. It is indeed standardized. If a phone supports the GSM bands used in the U.S. (they differ from Europe, but quad-band GSM phones are the norm and not the exception nowadays, especially for higher-end devices.), you can just pop in a U.S. SIM and go. The one exception is that phones can be locked to only accept SIMs from one carrier, so you need an unlocked phone if you want to use a device not sold by the carrier. Examples of phones not sold by any U.S. GSM provider but usable on the U.S. GSM networks include the HTC Advantage, HTC S710, HTC S730, and some of the GSM HTC Touch variants. (Although older Touches were only triband GSM, same for the 710 I think.)
Note here that while the phones sold may not be open (may be locked), the network NEVER locks out particular devices (at least I have never heard of such a thing happening.)
Ooops (Score:2)
I've been using it for years... (Score:3, Interesting)
The only real advantage to buying a phone from a carrier is that it'll come fully configured to operate on their network. When I buy non-branded phones I have to set them up myself. It's basically entering information for voicemil access, WAP gateway, and similar things. It's easy enough to find out most of this information though. Just do a quick Google search of your carrier & phone and you'll probably find numerous forum posts describing how to do it.
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Tmobile lets you use your desired phone too (Score:2)
I've been surprised that these announcements by Verizon and AT&T have been getting any attention, since this is seriously old news to me.
The amount of competition (Score:2)
Open network =! Open devices (Score:2)
Except for GPRS (Score:1)
Knowing that the AT&T network was GSM, I bought a relative a nice GSM phone. After all the expense (including a two year contract where I purchased the phone), he did not end up using it. Why? Because AT&T refused to enable GPRS for his phone even when he called customer service.
So, yes, the network can use GSM, but do not get a phone with any features because AT&T will not let you use them.
Re:Except for GPRS (Score:4, Informative)
A simple google search would have told you all you need to know about setting up your phone for data usage. Since you're obviously too lazy, let me tell you how now:
Configure the data connection:
APN: wap.cingular
User: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Pass: CINGULAR1
Wap Gateway:
IP Address: 66.209.11.32
Home Page Url: http://device.home/ [device.home]
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Indeed, this works for any phone or even a tethered laptop. The biggest implication of this announcement is that the data plan tiers are likely to fall away -- the only real difference between the $20 "MEdia Max", the $30 "Smartphone Max", the $40 "PDA Personal Max", and the $60 "DataConnect Unlimited" data plans are the device you tell them you have when you activate the service -- featurephone, smartphone, PDA, or data card.
Any EDGE or HSDPA data device functions quite happily at full rate with the $20
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The phone does have to be set up with the appropriate settings to 'log on' to their network though. At least with Nokia, I was able to get the settings sent to my phone over the air from Nokia's website--they had settings for a wide range of models and carriers. You might even be able to do the same directly from the AT&T website as well.
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I think the point of this exercise is that if you want to use unsupported hardware, you had better know how to use it. That's why this only affects us geeks, and the masses sti
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I just got back from a week in the USA. I bought a Cingular/AT&T SIM card and stuck it in my Nokia E61i. GPRS worked straight out of the box,
Not just AT&T (Score:2)
hmm yeah... maybe in theory (Score:1)
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Not really news (Score:2)
This is a plain PR release to attempt to on up Verizons PR release. There is no different between the ATT today and the ATT prior to the PR release. They have always had an open network, the ATT platform is another story, its pretty closed (ATT platform == ATT customized firmwares and such), and they love to exclude wireless if they can, and generally refuse to unlock the phones they sell, unless you beg.
Too late (Score:2)
I'm looking to US Cellular, any thoughts on that?
-mcgrew
Today's journal is NSFW [slashdot.org]
Re:Too late DUH i'm a moron (Score:2)
It's all about completements and substitutes (Score:2)
Yes, it is open, and no, they don't support... (Score:2)
In particular, the Blogger function of the K790a is not working for me anymore. Blogger says it's my carrier, AT&T says it's Sony Ericsson's fault, and they won't help me to even troubleshoot to provide info to SE since it's not one of their phones.
My next step is to lie to them and say it'
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Ah, well. I guess that's the kind of support you can expect from a free service. I just hope it doesn't happen again.
In regards to the proxy info, I pretty much only use that profile for the built-in NetFront bro
Outside devices operational, but still discouraged (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, they also have prepaid plans, but a monthly plan with more peak minutes than I'd ever use is the only way to get the free nights/weekends that I do use.
For the record, I ended up leaving Verizon for Unicel and love the service, the price, the plan features (free incoming calls and texts), and they don't do any locking of hardware at all. Now if only we can prevent Verizon from buying Unicel...
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That's because you're too busy paying three times as much for your outgoing calls.
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I pay 0$ for incoming calls, I pay 0$ in subscription fee, I payed 0$ in start-up fee and I pay 0$ for the first 142 minutes and 99 sms every month.
I do pay a lot for everything over those limits. However I have yet to go above the monthly free min/sms. So far the only thing I have paid for is the phone itself. How cheap are your outgoing calls?
In my case, the min above the 142, is 1,5 NOK per min, that is 0,27249 US$ acording to Google. I could get a subscription that I pay from the first min, (
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Well, either there are undisclosed costs or this is a marketing tactic based on the assumptuion that you are going to use a lot more than 142 minutes per month. Either way that's not telling us too much about the overall market.
What you need to look at is the total cost paid by all phone users for incoming and outgoing minutes.
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What's so special about free incoming calls and texts (SMS)? It's quite normal around here, I think nobody would buy paying for incoming calls here.
In the US, just about all mobile service (Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile,...) is billed per minute of air-time or per SMS-sent/recieved, regardless of the originator. If you are on a mobile phone calling another person on a mobile phone, then you are both paying for the call.
Its also common to have national plans where you aren't charged differently for calling close by or several thousand miles, unlike land-lines which generally have free incoming calls and differential pricing of outgoing calls depe
Re:Outside devices operational, but still discoura (Score:1, Interesting)
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Get a prepaid phone. Transplant the SIM card from your prepaid phone to the phone you want to use.
Except that the prepaid rates cost more than the "monthly plan" rates.
I don't have a home phone, so over the past six months I've averaged just over 400minutes on the phone each month with a max of 540 minutes, about half incoming and half outgoing. As well, about half is on nights and weekends, and half is during peak hours.
Since none of the prepaid SIM cards I've found provide free incoming calls or free off-peak, I'd be billed for every one of the 400minutes. At the best rate I've seen ($0.10/min) that
Re:Outside devices operational, but still discoura (Score:2)
Well just ask Verizon why you can't transfer files using OBX (bluetooth) then?
Oh, cause they disable OBX file transfers thats why.
Verizon cripples the software on their phones. Just go to PhoneScoop.com, look up your phone and see what features are disabled. You might just be shocked.
And when will they ever get a calendar app that works? Allows trnsfers to others, and my pc/yahoo account?
Good news for those... (Score:2, Insightful)
We can't guarantee the performance of the device, (Score:1)
# Worst network ever.
Slashdot is a bunch of hypocrites (Score:1)
Ripple Effect? (Score:2)
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OPEN COMMA TOO (Score:1)
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Re:iPhone (Score:5, Insightful)
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