Re: OT: Cellular telephone service

Eve Kotyk wrote:
> This and the fact that his office is in the lower level of the College Bldg might the problem. I don't quite understand the locked and unlocked business but I'll looking.

Locked vs. unlocked is pretty simple. Imagine you could get 2 telephone
companies to wire your house -- Sasktel and NiceGuys. If Sasktel sold
you a locked phone, and you later changed to NiceGuys, you'd have to buy
a new phone from NiceGuys, or convince Sasktel to unlock your phone
(since they have the key on a keychain). NiceGuys, OTOH, only provides
unlocked equipment -- since both Sasktel and NiceGuys (for the purpose
of this example) use the same connectors, you can use a NiceGuys phone
on either service.

On cell phones, assuming they're the same type (CDMA 1x or GSM), they
can go between providers (Fido or Rogers, or between Telus and Sasktel)
-- but only if the software on the phone is not locked. If it's locked,
the phone will refuse to work unless the signal it receives says the
magic key it's looking for (like Sasktel, Fido, etc). This way they can
sell you a phone for way below the MSRP, but ensure that it's pretty
useless to you if you want to break the contract and go somewhere else.
  Given that they usually have "pay us $20 x # months remaining" clauses
in the contract, this is a pretty dickish thing to do.
Received on Tue Sep 5 15:47:45 2006