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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