OT: Alternate Cellular

[Andrew Hammond]

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Chris isn't an un-educated techno-moron. He knows that by moving the SIM
card to a new phone his phone number and contract will follow it. That
is obvious from the second paragraph of his original post. He knows that
he needs an account with the guys who own the towers on the other end.

My understanding of his question is that he wants to know if he can buy
a 3rd party phone from an inexpensive source to avoid the whole contract
extension / lock-in business that Rogers (and other phone companies) get
up to when you try to replace your phone through them: "pay this silly
price to upgrade your phone... or... extend your contract and we'll give
you a huge rebate". (Where the rebated price is probably on a par with
what you pay $DISCOUNT_HARDWARE_STORE for the unlocked phone anyway.)

Drew


Vlad wrote:
>        Rogers' phone contracts will include the SIM card and its use,
> as that's what the account is tied to. Doesn't matter if you swap the
> phone or not, for that SIM card to do anything, the account needs to
> be live and tied to it.
> 
>        This is different from CDMA phones, which have a unique ID
> embedded into them, that's tied to the account.
> 
>        I'm all for some of the phones available at
> http://www.dynamism.com/ - I remember when the NEC phone was around
> US$600 a couple of months ago...
> 
> 
>        Cheers,
> 
>        -- Vlad
> 
> On 8/9/06, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> At places like Canada Computers, they're offering fairly sophisticated
>> late-breaking phones at what *appear* to be not overly lordly prices
>> that claim to be "unlocked."
>>
>> In principle, it would seem plausible to move a SIM card from elderly
>> phone into a nice new Razr or such.
>>
>> Is this a reasonable way to go about doing a cell upgrade?  That would
>> appear to be a reasonable way to untie from Rogers' phone contracts,
>> assuming that the phone continues to work, and assuming most of the
>> phone's functionality would work...  Or is that an unreasonable sort
>> of expectation?
>> -- 
>> http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/linux.html
>> Oddly enough, this is completely standard behaviour for shells. This
>> is a roundabout way of saying `don't use combined chains of `&&'s and
>> `||'s unless you think Gödel's theorem is for sissies'.
>> -- 
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> 
> 

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