I find it a little disturbing they're claiming it will work on Verizon (my current carrier for the past 10 years) and Sprint for a few reasons:
1) It's unlikely Verizon will have VoLTE on day 1 that the phone comes out. Even if so, one has to hope they become more liberal with what they allow on their network. Since it does not have any CDMA radio, that could also be a problem as LTE is not universal yet on their network as well.
2) Sprint does not let users actually know they have sim cards. My friend's Sprint Galaxy Nexus has the sim card embedded directly in the device and cannot be seen/removed. If that continues to be true with newer Sprint Phones, it seems like it would be hard to get a sim card compatible with Sprint's network.
3) #2 Assumes that Sprint has VoLTE, let alone much of an LTE network. As far as I know, it's still in testing at best and not ready for mainstream use.
I can just predict a lot of angry Verizon and Sprint users come early next year when they try to pop in the sim card to their device or call their carrier and find out they cannot use the phone on their desired network. Canonical really should be more up front with their claims of the networks that it will (realistically) work on.
Every time I read stuff about mobile careers in the US, I instantly think how awesome we have it in Europe.
We have 3 major mobile careers in my country (Vodafone, Orange and Cosmote), and my unlocked Android can work on all of them, whether we are talking about GSM, Edge, 3G, LTE, doesn't matter. And oh, you should see the pre-pay offers that we get.
Technological standards are only half the battle. The rest a mix of regulatory differences and the history of how the market happened to unfold. No European carrier was ever faced with attempting to build (and thus finance) a network for a continent-sized country.
Yes they did. All the big carriers had to build out their networks right across the continent of Europe comprising of lots of different countries each (back in early days) with their own regulatory frameworks.
How the US - just a single country (its size doesn't matter) - managed to end up with multiple competing standards continues to make my mind boggle, whilst Europe we managed to lock things down to a common set of standards right across the continent.
> How the US - just a single country (its size doesn't matter) - managed to end up with multiple competing standards continues to make my mind boggle.
I'm guessing it had to do with Qualcomm being a US company and having the advantage for obtaining contracts and influence from politicians and other bureaucrats at the time CDMA and GSM were being standardized and developed. CDMA originated with Qualcomm and GSM was mostly developed by companies outside of the US (I think starting in Finland).
The only early network that was across "lots of different countries" was the NMT system and that was in the Scandinavian countries, which have always been their own special sort of group of countries.
I don't recall a company in Berlin building out networks in Greece, but that's the equivalent of what McCaw Cellular was doing in the late 80s/early 90s
I find it a little disturbing they're claiming it will work on Verizon (my current carrier for the past 10 years) and Sprint for a few reasons:
1) It's unlikely Verizon will have VoLTE on day 1 that the phone comes out. Even if so, one has to hope they become more liberal with what they allow on their network. Since it does not have any CDMA radio, that could also be a problem as LTE is not universal yet on their network as well.
2) Sprint does not let users actually know they have sim cards. My friend's Sprint Galaxy Nexus has the sim card embedded directly in the device and cannot be seen/removed. If that continues to be true with newer Sprint Phones, it seems like it would be hard to get a sim card compatible with Sprint's network.
3) #2 Assumes that Sprint has VoLTE, let alone much of an LTE network. As far as I know, it's still in testing at best and not ready for mainstream use.
I can just predict a lot of angry Verizon and Sprint users come early next year when they try to pop in the sim card to their device or call their carrier and find out they cannot use the phone on their desired network. Canonical really should be more up front with their claims of the networks that it will (realistically) work on.