Originally Posted by
wco81
Supposedly LTE chipsets support falling back to HSPA.
But LTE may be an opportunity for carriers to lock in customers, as apparently a much wider number of bands are supported by the standard, perhaps too may for there to be true universal phones.
VZ and AT&T may purposely demand phone makers to support only the spectrum used by their networks, though they may not be able to force Apple to do so.
EU, one would expect, would be requiring interoperable LTE devices, just as it did with GSM/UMTS.
Roaming and worldphones may create a push against this. You are so right about the carriers having too much power.
In the US, however, the problem is that you can't get people to understand the real cost of smartphones. Until you can do this, the whole notion of paying less (initially) for a smartphone and having the difference rolled into monthly payments will be the norm. It is the same mentality that made zero principle mortgages popular a few years back or why people continually vote for candidates who continually vote to slash taxes without looking at how they make up the deficits (e.g. pushing the debt out to the future with costly notes or raiding all Government reserves so that it is the next guy's problem). TMobile tried this option by offering lower monthly payments for people who bring their own phones. It flopped.
As a side note, think back to when the FCC auctioned the LTE spectrum off and the promises that the carriers would respect sort of a Carterphone approach to open access. What odds do people want to give me that Verizon would let me activate an FCC customer provided device that Verizon didn't sell on the network?