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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Koplik who wrote (25014)	7/27/2002 2:33:52 PM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 197000

Jon - Nothing like a long list of questions all towards one point. Can you make a cell phone bought for one carrier usable by another? Answer is, I think (not entirely my area of expertise), yes, but it requires reprogramming. I remember reading of some user's trials and tribulations trying to change his phone from one carrier to another, but ultimately he was successful. The carriers make it hard precisely because they do not want you switching to another carrier. But I do not believe there is any hardware involved and we all know that CDMA phones can be 'reprogrammed' over the air. If this is not generally possible I will state that it is by design of the carrier as opposed to being an accident. As for some of your individual questions. Frequency - In the US there are essentially only two frequency bands for CDMA, and each carrier within a given market gets a portion of one or both of those bands. But if the phone works for a portion of a particular band it will work for any portion of that band for the simple reason that the carrier may not use the same portion of the band in other locales. (Note that often in other countries the bands are not the same as in the US so it is quite possible that a phone bought in one country is inherently unusable in another - although I suspect US and Mexico use the same bands.) Accounting software - It is true that everyone uses different accounting software but there are still interface standards. It's been 5 years since I was involved in this stuff, but I'd bet a lot of money that that billing interfaces are still standard. All this being said, in general the phone companies should be very leary of futzing with the software and database of a phone because it could probably cause some really severe problems (like the priority of the networks the phone uses, the vocoder loading, ...). So if they have any sense they will not allow it, much less help you accomplish it. Final interesting note - within vocoder research it has been known for quite some time that different languages require different parameters for maximum clarity. I do not know if this kind of tuning is done for phones, and I do not know how severe the effect is, but it could be a problem, and it is a problem that will probably get worse as we go to newer, more efficient, vocoders. Clark