[kwlug-disc] telus now has motorola droid lookalike "milestone"

[Chris Irwin]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 12:27,  <shane.msg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes and no.  The newer phones will support HSPA as a primary medium with the SIM card and where HSPA is not available will fall back to CDMA for Bell and Telus or GSM for Rogers and FIDO.

The iPhone for one does not have CDMA connectivity due to lack of
hardware, so a Bell iPhone would have no fallback from HSPA. I imagine
most HSPA phones would only have GSM fallback, if any.

>From my rather basic understanding of cell phones, GSM and HSPA get
their network IDs from the SIM card.  As such, it is possible to put
any SIM card (and thus any network ID) and switch providers (Putting
aside the issue of SIM locks)

CDMA phones have typically had the IDs branded into them, more akin to
a MAC address, from what I understand. Alternate providers do not
register each other's phones (i.e. Telus would refuse to register a
Bell phone). From what I've been reading, moving a CDMA phone between
providers is technically possible, but Bell and Telus do not allow it.

So assuming you had a phone that had both CDMA and HSPA, does the CDMA
connection use an internal handset ID? Or does it pull the ID from the
SIM card? If the former, then if you were to jump providers you would
lose said fallback. If the latter, why don't we have other CDMA phones
with SIM cards?

That said, I'm somewhat annoyed I got a CDMA Palm Prē just a few
months before Bell announced their HSPA network and Palm introduced a
GSM/HSPA version of their phone (though I'd have to import it). I'd
rather have gotten a phone I could move between providers, considering
the money spent..

-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>