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A Little History.

If you’re old enough to remember Ma Bell (if not, see www.bellsystemmemorial.com), you may remember one of the tricks they used to preserve their monopoly. Not only did you get your telephone service from AT&T, you got your phone from them as well. And you couldn’t buy it – they leased it to you, for a few dollars every month. They were good phones, made by Western Electric, a former subsidiary of AT&T. They were solid, built like a tank. Sure they cost a little more to manufacture, but they lasted for years and years. Which meant that AT&T received hundreds of dollars in lease payments over the life of a phone. A phone that they bought from themselves. Not bad for something that cost less than fifty bucks to make.

Ma Bell claimed they had a good reason for leasing your phone to you. If they allowed customers to plug any old phone into their system, it might bring down the whole network. Think of the threat to national security if that happened! Silly – that’s the equivalent of saying the guy down the block with five zillion Christmas lights is going to overload the national power grid. But until the breakup of AT&T in 1983, that’s how it was. After the breakup, people everywhere plugged in new phones they bought at the corner drugstore. And guess what? Nothing happened. Everything worked perfectly.

Now fast forward a decade. Ma Bell’s former minions have been scattered among the remains of the old Bell System. One of the places they landed was the emerging cell phone business. And one of the tricks they brought with them was the idea of controlling access to the system to increase profits. They didn’t have the muscle to control everything, like in the old days. They didn’t make the phones anymore. But they did control the distribution of the phones. And if the Motorola’s and the Nokia’s of the world wanted to sell phones in America, they were going to have to jump through hoops to do it. These “hoops” are a process called carrier certification. Carrier certification entails all sorts of testing and development to ensure that any particular cell phone is compatible with the carrier’s network. And it’s expensive. Carrier certification can easily cost over a million dollars per phone model.

So what’s a million dollars to a Motorola? It’s nothing, if you happen to sell ten million phones. But what if you only sell fifty thousand? Then you just spent twenty bucks per phone just to get in the game. And you lost. Hello, Moto - try explaining that to your boss.

What does all this mean for you? Carrier certification significantly increases the cost of new product development. And when you do that, you significantly decrease the risk a manufacturer is willing to take on a product that might not find the market that the RAZR achieved. So you end up with a lot less choice when it comes to picking out a cell phone.

A silver lining . . .

So what about GSM, then? The London Calling cell phone is a GSM phone. GSM stands for Global System for Mobile. It’s the mobile phone communication system used in most of the world, outside of the United States. Here in the States, we also use two other kinds of systems - CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and IDEN (you got us on that one). IDEN is the annoying public nuisance primarily operated by Nextel. Where you at, indeed. CDMA is used by Verizon, Sprint, and certain regional carriers like U.S. Cellular. CDMA and IDEN systems require an affiliate of the carrier to physically program your phone to allow access to the network. That means those carriers control every phone that accesses the system. Can you hear me now? Sorry – not without one of our phones.

T-Mobile and Cingular in the U.S. are GSM systems. A GSM phone uses something called a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card to tell the network about the phone and the user. Instead of programming your phone to allow it access to the network, a GSM system only needs the user to insert the SIM card into his or her phone to activate the phone and make a call. No creepy guy at Radio Shack is needed to program your phone – you do it yourself by inserting the card.

So how do T-Mobile and Cingular control access to their networks? It’s simple – the phones they sell are programmed, or locked, at the factory to only work with SIM cards issued for their networks. In other words, if you insert a T-Mobile SIM card in a phone locked to only work on Cingular’s network, you have yourself an expensive electronic paperweight.

There is a silver lining, however. The beauty of the GSM/SIM card system is that you can take your T-Mobile or Cingular SIM card and plug it into the back of any unlocked GSM cell phone and be up and running on that system. It doesn’t matter if Cingular or T-Mobile originally sold you the phone that you plug it into – only that it’s not locked to any particular system.

Guess what? The London Calling mobile phone is an unlocked phone. That means that all of you T-Mobile and Cingular subscribers only need to remove the SIM card from your current phone, and plug it into the back of our phone, and you’re ready to talk.

Want even more good news? All you world travelers can take our phone with you on your next trip. When you arrive at your destination, you can buy a prepaid SIM card that gives you a local number and great rates on calls back home – sometimes as low as $0.10 a minute. Try getting that kind of deal on international roaming from our carriers here at home.

So, even aside from its unique design, we think the London Calling mobile phone is a pretty smart idea. Have any questions? Please give us a call at (630) 614-4475, or email us:

Email: info@cdwireless.net