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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

I've always had the following idea about cell networks and I am curious what people here think of it:

We could mandate that providers must accept cell phones which can dynamically switch between networks at will. The wireless protocol can communicate the cost of access at any given moment and the device can decide which network to use.

Under such a system, lock-in is eliminated and providers finally see the full power of competition. Right now with high entrance and exit fees, competition is reduced significantly. This would aim to fix that.

What do people here think of that? Would it help?

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I think Verizon was required by law to allow 3rd party devices to use its acquired spectrum (I think it was the ~900Mhz?), and they just dragged their feet indefinitely under the guise of safety and security.

Unless the consequences of violating the rules is sufficiently expensive to harm earnings and growth, any rule you set forth is just cost of business.

>This would aim to fix that.

i.e Local Roaming. The problem is there is no way to ensure QoS over the network. You will need additional functions to ensure the network is best every time you switch.

>What do people here think of that? Would it help?

I am assuming you are talking about US MNOs or Carriers. And I am often lost and dont understand how anything in US works. It seems there are decent options, like Mint [1] which offer very decent 5G price plan, especially considering the wages across US. $30 for Unlimited or $25 for 20GB is very respectable.

So I am not exactly what the proposal would help, or trying to fix or improve.

Edit: I will add more context. If it is about better coverage and more site being built. Then this is actually a property ( surprise surprise ), regulation and market issues. No Technology is going to save you if the market, regulation or the people / culture does not allow you to install a 5G radio because they are scared.

[1] https://www.mintmobile.com/plans/

That's exactly how digital cellphones (GSM) originally worked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM

You will end up with something like energy demand response market. Where providers aren’t incentivized to build out the network for redundancy or QoS. Then you would need the Govt to step in to provide further incentives to build in rural areas where it’s uneconomical to build network. Naturally over time you will still have monopolies in certain areas because building the network is still costly, in the end winner takes it all. But those monopolies will be regional.

There would be no more incentive to build the widest coverage. In cities the fastest or cheapest network would win the spot market. Without the ability to reserve a wider network to their own customers whom they can charge a higher monthly bill, the additional CAPEX for rural towers doesn’t pencil out. To make rare expensive services like rural towers and generator backup work you’d have to charge a usurious amount per MB or session, or enforce a minimum purchase length to avoid adverse selection. And then you’re back to contracts.

Not really an issue, just build federal networks and rent them out to the mobile providers, at the same time giving the middle finger to the lobbyists that try to outlaw municipal networks.

I'm very confused - isn't this how phones work right now? Sans the dynamic cost marketplace of course - usually the phone sticks to the network of the sim card you've currently got slotted in, except when Roam-Like-At-Home kicks in. But you can manually select whichever network you want in theory.

European here and not an expert on this, maybe it's different in the US or I'm gravely misunderstanding something.

(EU citizen too)

You can't select any network, your home carrier has to have an agreement with the network you select.

They're talking about switching operators, not roaming - roaming means your traffic is still routed to your own provider. The concept, if I understand it correctly, is that you'd pay the best offered rate per byte around you at the moment, and your phone would be dynamically switching networks based on the offers.

The problem with this is that unlimited plans would go out of the Windows and we'd be back to paying per byte. Not great imho.

Entry and exit fees?? Is that what it's like in the US? In Australia you only get locked in by bundling the hardware on a contract, but if you own the phone, you can switch between providers as often as you like.

Ostensibly there are not fees for switching carriers, but there is always some random “setup fee” type thing that is unavoidable.

I think the parent here is suggesting though that you should be able to dynamically choose which tower/provider your phone is using, and would just be charged for the time on the system that you use. It’s a bold idea, and would destroy the existing carriers business model (which is largely dependent on contracts)

It would allow really remote area towers to charge more to amortize lower utilization

How do phone numbers work under such a system? That seems fundamentally incompatible with how phones work now.

National roaming, this is a solved problem and just how it works in some parts of Europe.

These days many phones have radios for all networks in the US. I don’t know how much Verizon still runs its CDMA network, but for the last several years it’s not been a hardware thing.

Verizon shutdown CDMA on December 31 2022.

On LTE and 5G, phone calls are already just VoIP (VoLTE/VoNR) over a pure data network, ideally you'd decouple your VoIP service completely from the dumb data pipe.

Of course the last thing that any ISP (wired or wireless) wants to do is commoditize their service as a a dumb data pipe - they all want the margins of those over-the-top services.

Isn't it how MVNOs worked, even in 3G? The phone tries PLMNs listed in SIM, the Node B/RNC relays auth requests to HLR that corresponds to that IMSI or number, and that HLR could be anywhere so long the RNC knows the ... address?

You need to define those terms for the rest of us

Not exact translation, but:

The SIM card contains information that allows it to negotiate with available cells regarding which cells and with what parameters it can connect.

The cell relay network (NodeB/RNC/etc) the connection to their owner service which sets up authentication with the SIM card - either by consulting service's "phone number database" based on the IMSI number of the SIM card, or by forwarding it to roaming peer's database (HLR). Then it keeps tunnels between phone and appropriate gateway.

SIM provides the identity of the "account/connection".

IMEI provides the identity of the actual terminal (arguably a bit like MAC address) - called "User Equipment" in UMTS/LTE/5G

BTS/NodeB/RNC/etc. - the radio segment - BTS/NodeB/ENodeB being the "base stations" and RNC is the radio controller (also called Mobile Management Entity in newer standards) which handles setting up connectivity from UE over NodeB to appropriate gateways (connecting to IP network or circuit switched phone networks)

HLR/HSS - Home Location Register / Home Subscriber Server - the part of the system that authenticates the subscriber identified by SIM. It's what maps the connection to right entity in network (to route phone numbers, match billing, etc.) - when you use roaming, the RNC/MME is set up in a way where it can find your original HLR/HSS (tackling extra fees as necessary)

gateways - different depending on version of network as well as whether you use IMS-only network (aka VoLTE/VoNR, in actuality part of 3G known better to people here as VoIP/SIP), or whether circuit switched fallback is used (operates purely on 2G and 3G, with latter being added in later revision).

The issue is with billing and which mobile provider is responsible for the phone number. If your phone is dynamically switching between 5 carriers, does that mean you now need to have 5 billing account as well?

You could imagine a separate business handling payments and managing the phone numbers. Kinda how ICANN handles domain names but you end up paying a third party.

Without changing existing protocols, it would work like MVNOs (mobile networks without own networks) operate, where they provide or lease identity management services and gateways to rest of the phone network, with roaming links set with owners of actual physical networks

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