Re: It isn't the phones

The issue is that, effectively, each carrier has a monopoly on phones that work on their network. I'm sure this would have come up before had we been forced to purchase laptops / PCs from our ISP. Since phones these days use software defined radios, my guess is that the difference between a iPhone 4 for one carrier and an iPhone 4 for another carrier is a simple reprogramming of an FPGA chip so that it speaks a particular carrier's transmission protocol. Really quite ridiculous that the carriers are allowed to control the cell phone market as they do.