Topic Review (Newest First)
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| 20-08-2008 09:23 PM |
| lmcjipo |
Net10 GSM phone
I just wanted to make 1 comment to Myth #1...
At least one GSM carrier that I'm aware of in the US does require users to use their phones. An unlocked phone will not work properly on their network. The company is Net10. There is something "extra" that they put in the firmware of the phones that they sell so that it will work properly with their SIM card. According to people who have tried it, an unlocked GSM phone with the Net10 GSM SIM will not work.
However, most GSM companies do NOT do this so an unlocked GSM phone (with the required band) will work with their SIM card on their network.
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| 13-12-2007 09:31 PM |
| Unregistered |
Rip Off!
Wow I didn't know that the American public is being subjected to such monopoly all these years I used to wonder why Nokia phones which are such a hit in India are not so popular in the US where Samsung Moto flip phones rule. Thats becoz the American consumer simply does not even know the choices he has with Nokia & the joy of using a Nokia phone, no wonder Moto/samsung struggle to sell their crappy phones here in India, they may have bullshitted the poor consumers in US by sheer lobbying all these years, I simply don't understand what the regulators are doing in the US government, how can they turn a blind eye to such a situation and boy its the height of hypocrisy when US government calls for open markets at WTO!!!! lmao
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| 04-11-2007 07:14 AM |
| Unregistered |
Some great points, but...
Here in the U.S., people are much more annoyed by the branding issue than the locking issue--must be careful with every button pushed to avoid purchasing expensive data services or products on most branded phones!
If customers can get a $300 phone for less than $100 locked, most will choose locked. Most like the *idea* of an unlocked phone, but the biggest problem is that within 2 years most people either tire of, lose, break or damage their phone.
What the U.S. definitely needs is 1) regulation of predatory branding, and 2) much more extreme competition to lower costs of voice and data services.
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| 01-07-2007 10:48 AM |
| Unregistered |
sign up for service without a "free" phone
There are stores in the US that are not operated by the network operator, but are "agents". These stores usually sell for more than one operaor, for example both AT&T and T-Mobile. They can only offer plans at the rates set by the operator, but they may be willing to give you store discount prices on the phones or give you store rebate if you sign up with your own phone.
The usefulness of unlocked phone is:
1) if, for some reasons, you travel in different countries part of the year, you can use a SIM from the local operator, which costs much less to use than the roaming charges.
2) if you bought an expensive, unlocked, phone, you can use it when you find a better plan from another operator and switch. With a locked phone, you have to either get it unlocked or toss it.
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| 07-06-2007 08:07 AM |
| Unregistered |
Here in Singapore,I can guess that more than 70 percent of mobile phone users do not even know 'locked phone'.
There are 3 operators in Singapore currently,Singtel,Starhub,M1
I am using a N6230i on a 2 year contract on Starhub,I tried my phone with sim cards from the other operators and it worked fine...
So I guess operators do not lock their phones, and yes,you are allowed to keep your phone when you terminate or have completed your 2 year plan,no questions asked ..
The most is that they will ask you to fill out a customer survey form.
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| 23-03-2007 05:19 PM |
| Unregistered |
Ok, I'm new to this smart phone business, but have had the same annoyances with locked phones and the mobile phone networks ruining your phone with their own software. Is there no way to completely reset your phone and reinstal the manufactuers original firmware, thus getting rid of the carriers annoying software?
Another personal annoyance is the habit mobile phone networks have of putting their name all over your phone. My Sharp 902 has Vodafone written on it in five places, Sharp is only written once!
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| 22-03-2007 10:32 PM |
| Unregistered |
Jk
myth 4 made me realize how much power America has and how much it's decision's impact the world
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| 07-03-2007 04:47 PM |
| quaixycap |
SIM only contracts
Just a little add-on to yesterday's note.
For comparison on Vodafone, the cheapest contract with a phone is Anytime 75, gives 75 mins & 100 texts , costs £20.
The cheapest, sim-only contract is also £20, but you get either 150 mins & 500 texts or 300 mins & 100 texts.
So in other words, the phone subsidy is the equivalent of 225 mins or 75 mins & 400 texts.
I'd say over half of the monthly fee is going towards repaying the "subsidy".
Also, after a contract expires, do you legally own the phone or does the teleco retain some ownership rights?
Once out of contract can you legally insist on getting the phone reflashed with the manufacturer's firmware rather than the teleco branded, crippled crap?
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| 06-03-2007 04:38 PM |
| quaixycap |
Phone Firmware
Hi,
Great article, totally agree with your sentiments. The so called "service" providers & there's a misnomer, if ever there was one, are holding us to random.
I'm in the middle of a wrangle just now between Vodafone UK & Nokia regarding firmware upgrades for the E70. Nokia have released upgrades but Vodafone won't allow them to be released. If I can get out of the contract, I will, & buy an unlocked E70 or E65.
Basically I wanted the phone to use VOIP as it's got a, not fully functional SIP, client. However, crippled as it is with Vodafone's crappy firmware, it's still capable of making phone calls via WiFi, when I'm at my rented flat in Ireland, where I work, with no landline, but with cable broadband.
This allows my friends & colleagues in the UK to call a local number to get me in the evenings & me to call them cheaply as well.
I'm taking the phone & a travel router with me to the states in a couple of weeks & will hopefully be making cheap calls from their too. My UK number will be on divert to voicemail before I leave the UK, with a message detailing the VOIP number.
I can't see politicians helping, by making locking & branding illegal, as per the old Finnish model, as in my humble & increasingly cynical opinion, they're all corrupt & in the pockets of the likes of mobile telcos.
It'll take the mass market, voting with their feet, exploiting any & all technologies, that bypasses the mobile & fixed line telecos to, force through these changes.
To get the mass market moving, will require the technically savvy early adopters, constantly pushing the case & exploiting whatever methods are available to erode these parasites businesses.
Hopefully most of those on that leading edge are also firmly in the anti-microsoft, pro linux/mac camp as well.
I share your disappointment at Apple's U-Turn by making the iPhone conform to the mobile operators model. As you say, a golden opportunity squandered, but perhaps only in the USA.
Europe, please keep the iPhone out of the hands of the mobile telecos.
As I've suggested, to more than one VOIP operator, maybe they should try to beat the mobile telecos at their own game. Get together, do deals with Nokia & others to bulk buy, uncrippled, SIP capable phones from the hardware vendors & sell them to the public with, low profit margins or better still, really play them at their own game, subsidised by a consortium of VOIP operators or with reasonable finance deals, bundled with a flexible mix of VOIP/PSTN call credit, PAYG mobile minutes & mobile broadband bandwidth.
Incidentally has anyone done a cost analysis of a VOIP call over mobile broadband compared to a traditional mobile call? I'd love to know the figures.
Also, does anyone do a PAYG mobile broadband service or have some other technique, to act as a backup to a ADSL/cable line.
Let's bring these evil empires down.
Oh & while I'm on a ranting roll - if junkmailers send you, crap & a pre-paid envelope, send them their own & any other crap of your choice, right back in the envelope.
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| 03-03-2007 11:55 AM |
| langdona |
I agree with Krisse but I think the problem is the network providers want you to purchase their branded phones and there contracts are biased in that way.
I don't think that this is at all fair for the following reasons.
1. The network providers do not make it clear that their phones are branded and locked to the network. They tell you that the phone is yours but I do not recall them stating that the phone will be locked to their network or that it may not provide the full functionality of that device e.g. you may not be able to download the latest firmware updates or that their own branded software could interfere with the performance of the phone. This I think deceives the customer.
2. The network providers subsidise the cost of the phone but reclaim that money back over the term of a fixed length contract. This implies that the contract includes a charge for the phone subsidy. Hence when the contract expires why does your monthly charge not get reduced. i.e. their should be alternative advertised contracts for people who carry on using an old phone or buy their own phones and want to have a monthly contract.
3. What gives the phone companies the right to lock a phone to their network. Yes this would be fine if you were just renting the handset but you are not, they make it very clear that the device is yours. So why do you have to pay to get the phone unlocked if you want to sell it on the open market to someone who wants to use it on another network.
So being in the UK I'm strongly thinking about raising these objections with Ofcom and seeing what they say. Typically the complaints side of their website is down today.
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| 01-03-2007 11:51 AM |
| epo.fm |
T-Mobile seem like one of the more forward looking UK network providors when it comes to data tarrifs but there web'n walk rates are a bit dissapointing.
£7.50 per mb is not cheap & even their *kind* offer to cap the the charge at £1 per day, could potentially still mount up to a whopping £30 per month - just for data usage alone.
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| 27-02-2007 03:34 PM |
| Webbunny |
Reply to elp
Thanks for letting me know this, I'm obviously not up to date on current deals! I just checked out the T-Mobile Pay Monthly SIM only deal, the 'Web n Walk day pass' that costs £1/day for 40MB is restricted by the same 'fair use policy'' that stops you doing anything but HTTP traffic, which Steve L found unacceptable. If you go for a 12/18 month lock in contract you can now get 'Web n Walk Plus' which relaxes these restrictions enough to make the service useful.
I'm on Orange at the mo, and I have their 10MB/month bundle added which cost me £8. If I was on PAYG and did their 'day pass' 8 days a month, it would cost the same and give me 200MB over the 8 days... Crazy!
The perfect situation for me would be T-Mobile Monthly SIM only with 'W n W Plus'... oh well, just another 12 months of my contract to go, maybe they'll be offering something like that by then!
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| 27-02-2007 02:03 PM |
| elp |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Webbunny
- In the UK, I have 2 choices - take out a restrictive, 12-18 lock in monthly contract, or get a Pay as you Go SIM. There is no option, from any provider, to get a 'SIM only' Monthly contract which doesn't provide a phone as well and therefore doesn't lock you in for a year or more to make sure you pay the subsidies that are funding the phone.
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Yes, T-Mobile has such a sim-free-no-strings contract. And other networks might have one too. Of course, they're usually hidden away deep down their web site and you really need to know where to look to find them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Webbunny
You can ONLY get reduced rates on Data tarrifs if you buy a 'data bundle' on... your restrictive lock in monthly contract!
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Not anymore. The situation is (slowly) improving. T-Mobile PAYG charges £7.50/MB but caps at £1/day after which you can keep browsing for free. So in effect you get unlimited (well, unlimited provided that you don't exeed 2GB/month) data on PAYG for £1 max per day.
Also, if you get the T-Mobile SIM-free contract, you can add the Web'n Walk option for unlimited data. The last time i looked it worked out at £15/month for 50 minutes X-Net + unlimited data (again unlimited up to 2GB) cancelable at anytime.
Orange has an unlimited data bundle for PAYG that costs £1 and is valid for a day (until midnight the day you buy it). Some say that if you use it over 3G, it's actually limited to 25MB but i haven't been able to find confirmation of that on the Orange web site the last time i looked. They also have a £4 bundle for 4MB valid for a month (good for the occasional email checking).
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| 27-02-2007 10:19 AM |
| Webbunny |
Hi Krisse
- The iPhone is locked to a network provider because Apple wanted to offer a new feature called Visual Voicemail... but to provide it the network that the iPhone is used on needs to build a proprietary backend server system to enable this. You must be able to understand that Cingular would want to lock any iPhone customers in to get some guaranteed revenue to cover development of this system.
If you #could# get an iPhone SIM free and you used it on your GSM network of choice, you wouldn't get Visual Voicemail (which Apple seem to think is a big deal and an essential part of the whole 'experience' - personally I couldn't care less!).
- In the UK, I have 2 choices - take out a restrictive, 12-18 lock in monthly contract, or get a Pay as you Go SIM. There is no option, from any provider, to get a 'SIM only' Monthly contract which doesn't provide a phone as well and therefore doesn't lock you in for a year or more to make sure you pay the subsidies that are funding the phone.
So, go for the PAYG option you say. The problem here is if you have a smartphone, you will use a lot of the data features on the phone as well as just making calls. And on PAYG in the UK no provider offers a 'data bundle' that gives you reduced data prices, you have to pay the full price, 'ad hoc' prices, which are just daylight robbery! How does £3 per MB sound to you?
You can ONLY get reduced rates on Data tarrifs if you buy a 'data bundle' on... your restrictive lock in monthly contract!
And finally, I have an N73. I can buy this phone SIM free in the UK for £290. If I did this I would then have to pay for my calls on top.
If I look on a website like Mobilechecker, I can find are over 20 tarrif packages for an N73 that over the lock in period would cost me less than £290, AND give me more call minutes than I need! Of course, if the service is rubbish I am stuck, but if its ok (I have been on all the UK networks apart from 3 and they are all as bad as each other!) I can threaten my current network that I am going to go to a competitor, and usually they will offer me an undocumented, highly competitive rate (which is just my last rate minus the phone subsidy) to stay with them...
Yes its a stupid way of running a business... but it seems all the phone networks in the UK are working as a cartel and only offering the same contractual options.
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| 27-02-2007 08:23 AM |
| epo.fm |
Sim Only - 'No contract' deals in the UK
It is possible to take your sim free phone & join a network without being locked into a 1 - 2 year contract. Generally at a LOT less than the usual £20 - £30p/m contract tariffs.
T-Mobile offer a £7.50p/m 'no contract' tariff offering 50 free mins a month.
But possibly some of the best 'no contract' deals are to be had by signing up as PAYG but also setting up a monthly direct debit. Spares you all the inconvenience of PAYG but can get you some decent free txt/data bundles for a very low monthly fee.
Orange - Top up £10p/m & get 300 free txts & 4mb data
T-mobile - Top up £10p/m & get free evening & weekend txts.
Obviously depends on your usage needs but I've managed to half my monthly bill with the PAYG set up.
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