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What do the carriers think?What do the carriers think?Posted Jun 28, 2007 17:49 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563)In reply to: What do the carriers think? by stevenj Parent article: An update from OpenMoko
US GSM providers (AT&T/Cingular and T-Mobile are the big ones) work like they do anywhere in the world, which means you can run an unlocked phone on their network just fine. It's true that the phones they sell you are often locked to their network, but they will generally remove that restriction on request (just tell them that you are traveling to Europe). I have a Chinese-market Motorola A780 that I've been using for the past two years without trouble.
As for the carrier's preferences, my experience is that they're happy to work with any platform as long as it's cheap. The Windows Mobile stuff is (for the industry) comparatively very open and hackable, for instance, but it's pervasively available in the US because Microsoft is essentially dumping it to gain market share (and, sadly, because it just works better than PalmOS or Symbian). If a free (beer) platform showed up that worked well, they'd be happy to pick it up and use it.
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What do the carriers think? Posted Jun 28, 2007 19:07 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Linux is different. As long as they can benefit from platform openness - it's not a problem, it's a plus. Unless, of course, you want to deliver this openness to the end user. That being said carriers should and will support uncrippled phones - as long as you buy them from someone else...
real carrier independence requires software radios Posted Jun 28, 2007 19:15 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] I guess the real problem is the proliferation of mobile phone standards; for example, a lot of US carriers don't use GSM. The ideal thing would be if it were possible to implement GSM, EVDO, etcetera in software. It's technically possible (e.g. Vanu Inc. apparently had a GSM receiver running on a 1GHz Pentium laptop 5 years ago); I wonder whether it's nearing possibility for the CPUs that run in a typical smartphone?(The initial OpenMoko-based phone is using a standard hardware GPRS modem from TI with a proprietary binary driver. This is understandable, as their primary concern is not the software-radio problem.)
real carrier independence requires software radios Posted Jun 28, 2007 20:55 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] For software radio to be technically viable, it's not enough for the CPU to be fast enough to keep up with hardware radio alternatives -- it would have to keep up while drawing the same amount of power. Not my area of expertise, but this seems like a pretty significant barrier.
(Then there are the idiotic FCC rules.)
real carrier independence requires software radios Posted Jul 3, 2007 23:55 UTC (Tue) by rise (guest, #5045) [Link] According to my sources inside Qualcomm a decent number of chipsets are available that do CDMA as well as GSM, but for various & sundry (as well as stupid) reasons they're almost never used to do both.
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