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".

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