Is this not part of why the cRTC made it against their policy to sell a locked phone anymore? Bell or some other company hard wiring or turning off features. Not to mention consumers paying a grand for a smart phone only to be unable to keep that phone if they left? Karen On Mon, 8 Sep 2025, Alvin Starr via Talk wrote:
On 2025-09-08 10:09, James Knott via Talk wrote:
On 9/7/25 23:08, Alvin Starr via Talk wrote:
But at some point Rogers moved to GSM and Bell went with CDMA so that if you had a Bell phone you could not use it on a GSM based carrier. The reason I got the CDMA phone was because of the data features of CDMA but strangely those features were turned off in the Bell provided phone. Much to my displeasure.
My 2nd phone was on Rogers, but used IS-136, which they had before GSM. There was supposedly a cable for it that could be used to use the phone as a dial up modem. However, I never saw that cable and it was an extra cost service. As for CDMA vs GSM, that's just incompatible, not locked. It would be locked if you couldn't take a CDMA phone from Bell and use it on Telus.
You are right in GSM vs CDMA is not a locked issue. I had not intended to make that implication but I guess I did.
I could use the phone on the Telus network but that was roaming.
The phone had been "modified" by Bell to disable some features and other features were hard wired into the Bell network.
At the time Telus was not an option that I knew of.
So it may have been possible for the phone to have been removed from the Bell network and added to the Telus network but the firmware wired features would have still been setup for the Bell network. The downside was that the phone was deliberately crippled by Bell and that was something that was not easily fixed.
I guess if the phone was locked or not depends on your definition of "locked".
-- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || home: (905)513-7688 alvin@netvel.net ||