Am 28.08.2005 04:18 schrieb Joseph:
In fact, they could. I don't know if they do, but the technology is there. Any GSM-network can check the IMEI of any phone, that want's to connect to the network, and decide whether to allow that phone on the network or not.
This is actually an anti-theft measure. There are international databases that collect IMEI numbers of phones reported as stolen. These phones are rendered useless on networks, that cooperate with such a database. Sadly, only very few networks do that. They think economically: "Every phone, that is stolen from someone (which, most likely, was a customer of another network in another country) and ends up in my own network saves me (or my customer) a lot of money. So why should I block it. My customer would be angry, if he didn't know he bought a stolen phone."
However, you could use that technology the other way round: block all phones on your network that do not have certain IMEIs -- these being only IMEIs of phones you sold yourself. Still, I doubt that anyone would do that, it's not economical.
I think, that the people who've run into problems here have simply locked handsets and do not know how to unlock them. However, most handsets can be easily unlocked (except recent Nokia models like 6630 and 6680). Their new provider is too dumb to tell them and rahter utters some nonsense.
Daniel AJ
My e-mail-address is sokolov [at] gmx dot net