Crossroads

Sean Moss-Pultz sean at openmoko.com
Fri Mar 16 07:36:43 CET 2007


On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 17:44 +0000, Ian Stirling wrote:
> Benjamin C Burns wrote:
> > Sean Moss-Pultz wrote:
> >> Companies like Cingular have been known to whitelist handsets.
> >> They *could* do it for the Neo. I highly doubt they would.
> >>   
> > I mean no offense here, but by "whitelist," do you actually mean 
> > "blacklist," or ban?
> > 
> > I don't really follow the day-to-day of this market very much, but does 
> > FIC have any branding agreements with Cingular or T-Mobile?  If so, it 
> 
> A white list is the inverse of a blacklist.
> Any device on it works.

Ah...I meant something slightly different. I was referring to Tim Wu's
paper:

        "The method of exclusion is a “whitelist” of Verizon phones
        which, by implication, prevents others from working. Without an
        approved ID number, telephones not sold by Verizon will not be
        recognized and
        cannot be used on the network. This effectively makes Verizon
        Wireless the gatekeeper of market entry for telephones on their
        network, like the AT&T of old.
        
        The whitelist is not a matter of technological necessity. Sprint
        is also a CDMA carrier and its practice is slightly different.
        Sprint keeps a list of customer ESNs and bars the use of
        existing ESNs—which can be evidence of a “cloned” or stolen
        telephone. While Sprint “discourages” the use of non-Sprint
        phones on its
        network, and will not offer technical support for such phones,
        it does not block the use of phones on its network as Verizon
        does. In other words, a consumer who owns his own phone can call
        Sprint customer service and have his phone activated on the
        network.

Hopefully that makes things clear.

-Sean






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