FCC UnLock law?

[Palm_forlackofchoice]

What good does the unlock law do if the carriers won't activate the phone any way?

I would like to buy a $50.00 Boost or Virgin Lumia 635 to play around with win10 (sprint wants $168). Sprint will not activate a Boost or Virgin phone on my account, saying they are prepaid and system will not allow it.

I would like a HTC M1 8 from Verizon also but not worth $500-600. But at least with the Verizon phone they have some merit as it has not been tested on the Sprint network. The Boost and Virgin phones have been tested and run on Sprint.

 

[ratsttam]

Unlocking has nothing to do with the carrier database that's used for CDMA devices. Boost/Virgin, even though they use Sprint as their backbone, the ESN/IMEI are kept separate.

Even though Verizon LTE phones are already sim unlocked, you can't get one onto Sprint, as Sprint doesn't have it in their ESN/IMEI database for the CDMA side.

You can't use a GSM phone on Verizon either, even though their LTE uses the same system.

Until the US goes the way that the EU has gone, and mandates that the cellular tech be standardized, this problem will not go away. And it's VERY unlikely that we'll see cell companies stateside switching technologies just to switch them.

 

[ashram]

welcome to the downside of CDMA carriers....

 

[Palm_forlackofchoice]

I was given some information today, can't confirm if accurate though. Best buy phones are supposed to USA universal phones, meaning for example you could buy a Verizon HTC one m8 off contract and sprint may activate it. Not sure of any radio band difference so some functions may not work.

 

[ratsttam]

I was given some information today, can't confirm if accurate though. Best buy phones are supposed to USA universal phones, meaning for example you could buy a Verizon HTC one m8 off contract and sprint may activate it. Not sure of any radio band difference so some functions may not work.

The Verizon phones GSM radios are not locked down. So you can get the VZW LTE phones, put a tmobile or att or really any other gsm sim card in, and it will work (assuming correct radio bands).
Sprint WILL NOT activate a device whose ESN/IMEI is not in their database. It is possible, using your example of the M8, that an unlocked one was entered into both the Verizon and Sprint databases, in which case, they'll see it as their own device. I've heard of the iphones that were bought unlocked from the apple store having compatible esn's, as well as some of the newer Nexus phones having their esn's submitted to Sprint.

Before you purchase one, see if you can call Sprint with the esn you want to use, and verify they can activate it.