I was reading a bit about different phones, and one point that comes up a lot from USA commenters is that people cannot just use any phone they want, it needs to be a specific model supporting their network carrier, especially the network bands.
I live in Europe, this is pretty unknown here, and from what I gather, Asian buyers are also free to use any phone they want.
How come that nothing has ever been made to improve that situation?
No, you can get phones that will work with any carrier’s frequencies. There are some differences in phones and carrier frequency support, but there’s loads of overlap – a phone will be able to talk to another carrier’s network. They have to for roaming to work.
What you may be thinking of is phones that are “locked” to a phone provider’s network, which is very common when getting a phone. Basically, you get a phone plan and receive a phone from the carrier at a price that loses the carrier money. The carrier then goes and makes up the difference with higher monthly rates on your plan than would have normally been the case – basically, attaches a small loan to the plan. It lets phone companies have a low up-front price. It’s questionable as to whether this is a good financial idea for consumers, but it’s not a technical limitation. As I recall, there’s some regulation that requires carriers to unlock carrier-locked phones upon request after a period of time.
kagis
Yeah.
https://www.fcc.gov/general/cell-phone-unlocking
Doesn’t affect me, because I’ve only ever purchased unlocked cell phones.
Interesting. Seems like people in the US aren’t aware of the change as they bring it up quite regularly
Edit: found another comment saying that “even if imported, they are not compatible” about Sony phones, is this correct?
https://reddit.com/comments/1i7o7z7/comment/m8mx3jw