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There's actually a really good reason why this isn't coming anytime soon to the US: number portability is not entirely centralized, and the porting system is built to run in batch, not in realtime. So if, say, Sprint issues a portability request to Syniverse (the mapping platform provider) so that they can have your number from Verizon, Syniverse puts that request in the next batch. Then the batch gets passed to VZ for evaluation for things like whether you still owe them money. If you're good to go, VZ kills your DN (that's your number and the associated SVC mapping), and your VZ service goes dead. Then they pass your record back to Syniverse who then passes the thumbs-up and the number to Sprint who sets up a new DN to your new service (and presumably your new handset if you're going from one locked-in CDMA net to another). That's a really watered down, 4am version of what happens. But the upshot of all of it is that if it worked like WiFi SSID switching, every time you switched, you'd probably lose service for awhile. If all things work for the good, the switch can take like 10 minutes. I'm sure they could get it down to 1 or 2. But probably not 0. Here's the punchline... the SIM card in GSM was specifically designed to OBVIATE the need for all that (also to act as an encryption key, but that got hacked years ago). The SIM is supposed to authenticate you to a particular DN and link you back to a billing record at your primary carrier. The theory was that every carrier would create roaming treaties, and you'd just wander from network to network, oblivious to whose actual network you were on. And your primary carrier would sort it out on the backend. And in many places, it actually pretty much works that way. You can carry 3 or 4 cards and swap carriers and numbers based on the plan you want to use. Because the phones aren't locked to a single carrier's cards. A good example of this is that in the T-Mobile / AT&T breakup, they came to an agreement to allow cross-network roaming sometime late this year. So if you're a TMo subscriber, but you've got an AT&T signal, even in a TMo service area, you'll just ride AT&T instead. So essentially the reason it doesn't already work this way is because A) CDMA is so popular in the US, and CDMA really requires the rigorous porting process, and B) the carriers who do support it (AT&T, TMo and Sprint on their now-dwindling GSM net) have been jerks about it for years. It's a business decision, not a technical one. |