These firms can exert that level of control because they don't use a system employed by the other nationwide carriers, Cingular, T-Mobile and Nextel. Those firms all sell phones that store a customer's account data on a tiny subscriber identity module (SIM) card that can be moved from one phone to another.
This SIM card is a core feature of the technology Cingular and T-Mobile use, GSM (shorthand for global system for mobile); Nextel, which uses a different system called iDEN, saw fit to adopt the SIM card as well.
| | | | ___Personal Tech E-letter___ Washington Post personal technology columnist Rob Pegoraro answers reader e-mail and expands on themes he touches on in his weekly newspaper column. The e-mail version of this weekly feature includes links to the latest gadget and software reviews.
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Customers can use this to expand their choice in various ways. They don't have to choose one model of phone; they can purchase a powerful but bulky phone to carry around the office, then buy a lighter, flashier model to wear in the evening. Or they can take their phones from one carrier to another -- once, that is, they undo the locks that Cingular and T-Mobile place to prevent another carrier's SIM card from functioning.
T-Mobile will unlock a phone after the first 90 days of a contract; Cingular will do so once a contract has ended and a customer is moving to another carrier. Customers can unlock phones on their own, but the procedure can be tricky. (This isn't a factor with Nextel, as no other major carrier uses iDEN.)
Sprint and Verizon phones use a different wireless standard called CDMA, but there's no reason their phones could not employ a similar subscriber-identity card. Industry developers came up with that exact thing back in 2001, called the removable user identity module (R-UIM), with the same size and shape as a SIM card.
A few carriers in Asia now sell phones using these cards -- but in the United States, Sprint and Verizon seem to think that R-UIM spells "ruin" for their businesses and have declined to adopt it. So their subscribers can eat only what these companies put on their plates.
This tension is only going to get worse, as the price and features of such phones as the Treo 650 and comparable Windows Mobile devices increase. How long will people spending hundreds of dollars for these gadgets consent to having their use of them dictated by their carrier?
It might be a long time. AT&T's lock on landline phone hardware lasted for decades, until in 1968 the Federal Communications Commission ruled that Ma Bell could not forbid the use of other companies' hardware on its lines. Among other unanticipated benefits, that helped open the Internet to anybody with a phone line. What might we be passing up now?
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.
