Comment by pbasista
2 days ago
I do not see a rational reason why a mobile carrier should have any say in which connectivity technology is enabled for use with its mobile network on a particular phone model.
It should work based on standards, mobile carrier's capabilities and phone's capabilities. If a phone supports capability X, such as VoLTE, then it should just work with all mobile carriers that support that capability. No conditions.
As an imperfect analogy, consider a road, representing a mobile network. This road has some capabilities, such as speed limit. There are cars driving on this road, representing mobile phones. And then consider that a road management company, representing the carrier, would impose different speed limits on different cars, depending on whether they are affiliated with the road management company or not.
Would that be acceptable in a physical world?
If not, we should not accept anything similar in a digital world either.
The official reasoning is that the spec documents and certification testing aren't good enough, and each cellular cores has each its own quirks, interpretations, parameters, and they don't know if the phone is compatible with each networks unless Carrier Acceptance/Inter-Operability Test is done at carrier certified tests.
So why not actually perfect the spec and cut those uncertainties and costs...? idk.
It's not even the mobile carrier that has a say, it's just Google. If Google doesn't sell the phone in a country, they just disallow the feature for everyone, instead of just allowing it as long as the carrier supports it. The carrier doesn't mind (if they did, they'd block by IMEI and the workaround wouldn't have worked)
It had been a thing since mobile phones existed.
Pre-paid cards that required paying for unlocking the phone firmware, eventually forbidden on EU countries.
Vodafone famously had their own firmware on Nokia N95 in Germany that disabled tethering,....
It starts by regular people being trained to accept that lack of quality and restrictions are normal in digital world.
Depends on how the rollout of mobile networking historically went in a particular country. (Mostly, from what I can see, if it was the entrenched landline monopolists from the start or if they had to outcompete a few upstarts first.) In some places (Russia, Ukraine) you have to explain to people what a carrier-locked phone even is, and they get (understandably) appalled at the concept. Others (Turkey) have went as far as to have infra to IMEI-block you after you spend too much time in the country until you pay up.
Turkey situation is different. IMEI block is here to collect exorbitant taxes.
This have nothing to do with carriers.
I think it depends; speculating but probably volte is a very complicated spec with many optional enhancements ( think ssl with cipher types )
So carrier can choose to whitelist/blacklist phones depending on extensions available
> whitelist/blacklist phones depending on extensions available
That would be, I believe, fine. Those are capabilities-based restrictions.
From my point of view, the issue would be if the same phone worked with the same technology over the same mobile network when connected via a carrier A but the same phone on the same network refused to work with the same technology when connected via a carrier B.
> From my point of view, the issue would be if the same phone worked with the same technology over the same mobile network when connected via a carrier A but the same phone on the same network refused to work with the same technology when connected via a carrier B.
But thats the whole point of carrier profiles ( If I didn't understand wrong. )
Eventually it is the carrier who decides what you can do. ( this can also may be related to deals they made with manufacturers )
I think in this case, it is just missing carrier profile. ( which is like a config file )
> As an imperfect analogy, consider a road, representing a mobile network. This road has some capabilities, such as speed limit. There are cars driving on this road, representing mobile phones. And then consider that a road management company, representing the carrier, would impose different speed limits on different cars, depending on whether they are affiliated with the road management company or not. > Would that be acceptable in a physical world?
A number of cars on the road today can be remotely disabled by a device built-in to the car.
While personally I think this is risky, in the U.S., we also have police, sheriffs, highway patrol, M.P.s and others that have authority to tell other cars to stop or to physically stop them, which is just another way of doing the same thing. They also enforce speed limits.
So, no I don’t think that the ability to drive a vehicle as fast as one would like is a global right, per current laws.
> would impose different speed limits on different cars, depending on whether they are affiliated with the road management company or not.
With the state as road management company and public transit as state affiliated then the answer is this exists already.
Your core premise is that if someone can do something for you then they should, but you get to capture all the value from that.
It should work based on standards, mobile carrier's capabilities and phone's capabilities.
That's how it was with GSM.