Originally Posted by
vrud Personally I never understood why to purchase electronics from a service provider.
It's a legacy of the US carrier system.
The US carriers use two different, non-compatible standards (GSM and CDMA), and within those standards, the carriers use different groups of frequency bands. Effectively, each carrier had to have phones custom-built for that carrier, with the right standard and the right radios with the right frequency bands, preventing phones from being moved from one carrier to another. Even with LTE phones (LTE as a technology is the same on all carriers, and is based on GSM), the carriers use different bands, requiring different phone builds.
This happened because of the huge number of people using cell phones, the large density of users in cities, as well as the need to cover users in huge expanses of rural areas.
In most countries, GSM is the only standard, and all phones use the same frequency bands, allowing phones to be independent of carriers, and easily moved from one to the other simply by replacing a SIM. Hell, CDMA phones don't even HAVE SIMs - that security is built-in to the phone and non-removable.
The phone manufacturers, realizing that US carriers had to have their own phone models, elected to outsource the SUPPORT of those phones to the carriers. This made sense because the carriers had to have a big retail presence anyway, and because that saved the manufacturers from having to have redundant retail support locations and staff.
Other countries work very differently because most have (or used to have) a much smaller number of subscribers, making it easier for a single standard and single set of frequency bands to cover the whole country. That's just not the case here.
The good news is that LTE is on track to completely displace both GSM and CDMA in the US, with phone calls eventually being made via VoLTE instead of on legacy connections. There are already LTE radio chips that cover all 40 authorized LTE bands, so future phones will only need LTE radios, and they'll be movable from one carrier to another with ease, just like phones are in most GSM countries now. Maybe then the carriers will have a reduced retail role and more manufacturers will handle support directly, turning carriers into the "dumb pipes" that other countries have enjoyed, and that the US carriers have long resisted becoming. But until then, nothing is changing.