On Thursday, June 13, 2002, at 11:07 , Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Benjamin Kowarsch wrote:
>
>> But obviously you can't have SIM cards in a market where the market
>> leading network has a near monopolistic grip on the phone
>> manufacturers.
>> Imagine any customer of J-Phone or KDDI could just buy any handset,
>> stick their SIM card in and use it on a non-DoCoMo network.
>
> Well, hey, you can already buy a Docomo phone and use it on every
> PDC network in the world! :-)
Quite obviously, I was thinking about the Japanese market. But even so,
with interchangeable SIM cards, you could take your card and roam
overseas with a different handset (provided roaming infrastructure in
the networks)
> But if we had true phone portability, handset subsidies would have
> to go away. And then we'd all be paying around 30,000 yen for a
> new phone, right? Whereas now I can go down to my local Bic Camera,
> grab a 504i, and....oh, never mind.
In the end, handset subsidies are not coming out of the phone companies'
pockets but out of the users' pockets, in form of higher usage charges.
Moral: TANSTAAFL
rgds
benjamin
Received on Thu Jun 13 08:07:01 2002