[conspire] AT&T and CPUC

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Steve Litt (slitt at troubleshooters.com):

> As far as I know, in the US, your cell phone and your carrier are a
> package deal, with absolutely no interoperability between mismatched
> carrier/phone combinations. Those carriers aren't anxious to service
> second hand phones.

Point of possible interest:  I didn't bother getting a cellphone of my
own until circa 2001, and then got the then shiny-new Motorola RAZRv3
flipphone, pointedly eschewing telco-captive handsets and getting that
one directly from Motorola.  (That was on a Cluetrain Manifesto "Markets
are conversations" theory, where what I was saying was that
vendor-locked hardware was totally unacceptable.)  I then bought more of
that exact same model, repeatedly for over 20 years.  Dirt-cheap, by the
way (after the first one).

And, my point:  Being a GSM phone, it worked just fine with _any_
GSM-based mobile provider, all over the world.

I still have the final unit, sitting in a ziplock bag in a drawer,
retired -- because US providers EOLed all 3G service and repurposed that
bandwidth.  Otherwise, I'd probably still be relying on it.