Hi Scott, Yeah, I’m afraid Apple pull a lot of crap when it comes to supporting carriers and GSM. You’ve got to pay to get Apple to recognise you as a carrier and provision the carrier settings, which Apple signs. These include the logos, roaming partners, voicemail, and all that stuff. Those settings are pretty important, because they control all the essential parameters. Worse yet, as I discovered, it sucks to be a VNO if Apple has an exclusivity deal with your parent. My provider, Giffgaff, runs on O2, and O2 wants you on contract for tethering. So for a long while, you couldn’t tether if you had a perfectly legitimate giffgaff SIM, with the account provisioned for a data-limited and tethering-permitting plan. And even for generic GSM support, Apple deliberately limits the frequencies in use, so no LTE. From my reading and writing on this my understanding is that it’s a very similar story with other VNOs and otherwise unrecognised carriers in other parts of Europe. It’s all pretty shameless. About the only thing I can see as beneficial here is that the users need not get all confused, but mostly I think it’s just a way to lumber the rest of the world with an obsolete business model. Here’s to hoping that Apple can do without the carriers real soon now, and then (I’m less sure this will happen, but one can dream) the need for carrier restrictions in software. For the fact is that if you buy an unlocked phone, it should be unlocked. Nobody has gone to court over it yet, but it’s pretty hard not to see that there’s some fixing going on IMO. The best part is that some Apple sycophants object to Apple’s being caught up in the blame like this, saying that it’s all those horrible carriers’ faults. It’s delicious.
Here’s Apple’s official listing of restrictions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204039 On the universal network angle, I think it’s just a matter of deployment. Imagine if some universal mesh-network routing protocol became ubiquitous, and everyone had it in their operating systems and wireless chipsets. Sure, it wouldn’t be hands-on, but everybody would have it, and every device could take advantage of it. Perhaps we could call it the SubEthaNet? :) I built my radio from a kit when I was a kid. But it was still a fascinating and illuminating experience. The problem then, as now, is that radio is still a much more controlled broadcast experience than the Internet is, as you yourself observed. -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at [email protected] The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
