After two years, I'm coming back to this. I think I have an idea why (and no it isn't people replying to the post on Facebook although that did help). If you want to know why you'll have to contact me privately.
Is the reason our cell phones are tied directly to particular telecoms because of the nature of the network? Something tells me the phone companies are just being greedy. This is the same industry that had a class action lawsuit filed against it for extraneous fees. Even when two companies use the same network, a given phone must be hacked to use in a different network. CELL PHONES SHOULD BE INDEPENDENT OF THE NETWORK THEY ARE USED ON. To give you an idea what it is like now: if the same were true with say printers. Dell might say you canot use any printers other than Dell printers. If you have attached a printer other than a Dell printer, we cannot help you no matter what, even if your problem is that the power button is broken on your computer. You voided your warranty by hooking up that HP printer.
Why was our government so obsessed with the stupid digital TV thing when the cell phone issue would appear to affect more people? Maybe GSM being a corporation and not a governmental entity? (3 billion is a lot of people) I figure the market might even have eventually decided that digital TV was the way to go if it really offered that much quality improvement.
Ultimately, I want to be able to use the IPhone on Sprint and the G1 on AT&T, and there should be no reason I can't do that.
