iPhone3 Unlocked - Compatible with Sprint carrier???

[MarkinAZ]

My daughter currently has a HTC Hero cell telephone which is hooked-up to Sprint, and I thought I'd present a question to some of you Inmates who are "cell telephone saavy" with all of the changes occurring in the industry.

Sprint carrier apparently runs on CDMA and the iPhones were geared up for GSM (and please correct me if I'm wrong on this).

Question: Can an unlocked iPhone3 run on the Sprint carrier? Just looking to see if there have been any current changes wherein I could purchase one of these iPhones, and replace the HTC Hero with an iPhone3 on her Sprint plan.

Thank you and look forward to hearing any responses...

[Ogre]

Nope, I looked into it a while back. Was informed it does not work with Sprint, but I am running an AT&T phone.

[markem]

Highly unlikely and a quick check of the sprint forums shows that everyone is claiming that only sprint branded iphone work. Here's an example response to those asking the same question:

"Just to add an official response, SheilaMcLane and Slownetwork are correct. you can only use a Sprint branded iPhone 4 & 4S on the Sprint network."

[MarkinAZ]

Thanks for the response Larry/Marc. That's what I was under the impression that Sprint was bulk purchasing iPhones and taking their SIM number or Serial number and placing them into their digital inventory bank. Anything that was a non-Sprint iPhone would not work on Sprint. But,

I just had to ask the question in case things have changed to date...

[omowasu]

The answer is no but not because of locked down serial numbers. The iPhone 3 was sold by Verizon and ATT. Apple built the handsets to access ATT GSM frequencies and Verizon CDMA frequencies. Since Sprint CDMA resides in a different band than Verizon CDMA, the Verizon phone will not run on the Sprint network (and vice versa), and ATT will not run on either! Someday this will change, probably with the evolution of VoLTE...

[dilespla]

Originally Posted by omowasu

The answer is no but not because of locked down serial numbers. The iPhone 3 was sold by Verizon and ATT. Apple built the handsets to access ATT GSM frequencies and Verizon CDMA frequencies. Since Sprint CDMA resides in a different band than Verizon CDMA, the Verizon phone will not run on the Sprint network (and vice versa), and ATT will not run on either! Someday this will change, probably with the evolution of VoLTE...

Exactly. In laymen terms, the technologies are different. Kind of like trying to tune in an AM radio station on an FM tuner... not going to happen.

[MarkinAZ]

Originally Posted by omowasu

The answer is no but not because of locked down serial numbers. The iPhone 3 was sold by Verizon and ATT. Apple built the handsets to access ATT GSM frequencies and Verizon CDMA frequencies. Since Sprint CDMA resides in a different band than Verizon CDMA, the Verizon phone will not run on the Sprint network (and vice versa), and ATT will not run on either! Someday this will change, probably with the evolution of VoLTE...

Originally Posted by dilespla

Exactly. In laymen terms, the technologies are different. Kind of like trying to tune in an AM radio station on an FM tuner... not going to happen.

Great explanations... Thank you both