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Root Carrier unlock?

donjuro said:
It's not that there's no way known, it's that it's not possible. Two completely different types of technology.
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This was once a completely valid statement but now the carriers and hardware manufacturers have been blurring the lines of the CDMA/GSM divide. Especially with the vast majority of devices using one of Qualcomm's systom on chip boards as the major functional component of their device. You see a lot of the tablets that run on wifi using other hardware but qualcomm is dominating devices that connect through cellular networks because their system on chips tend to have all the modems built in for all the technologies right off the bat. That gives hardware manufacturer's lots of flexibility in being able to offer similarly designed devices across carriers. I believe if I'm not mistaken the volt runs msm8960 and that system on chip does in fact have gsm and HDSPA+ (or whatever their inbetween 3g and 4g technology was is called) and I think it may even be the same board that's in the Moto X which I was working on unlocking from sprint to unlocked GSM. I didn't get all the way there (got close, only needed UICC unlock solution which I'll get into later) but I have heard someone has since I was forced to give back the client's phone that I was using to work on the project.

But there are a couple of hurdles, first off who knows if this device has antennas properly attached for functionality with the gsm radios and if LG released any open source code that is usable to allow android to be compiled utilizing these modems.

Then the big one is convincing sprint to UICC unlock them, sprint devices specifically have a very well implemented means of locking down their devices based on the UICC card (what they call sim cards for LTE on cdma devices) and getting past this carrier lock with the UICC is quite tricky. If this was sprint instead of virgin mobile, it is possible to get sprint to release a prl that carrier unlocks it to be used by any sim card with the proper LTE functionality but Virgin mobile does not have access to the system that sends out these ota unlock files and sprint will just say that you aren't their customer and you will have a difficult time talking them into doing it for you unless you happen to be their customer as well for some reason. The UICC unlock is where I personally have gotten stuck before on sprint devices with this board and really there is not much of a way to tell if the other requirements are even met because it will refuse to even read anything that isn't issued from sprint without that unlock.

Get your volt UICC unlocked and we can resume discussion about possibly getting a gsm carrier sim working on it. Until then talking about it is kinda pointless. for all intents and purposes though, the quoted statement is correct for this device. It's really only devices like the Moto X that get released in forms nearly identical for all carriers or phones released as "world phones" where it is really worth the time trying to unlock it for gsm carriers because otherwise you could spend a lot of time and energy hitting a dead end should it not have proper antennas or something dumb like that. Basically something theoretically get-aroundable but not at all worth the time and effort.
 
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It's been awhile since I was doing any dev work but when I was there was still a lot more questions then answers on how exactly sprint had this UICC unlock implemented. There was one or two devices that had UICC unlock solutions at all and I looked into them fully and they were based on vulnerabilities only HTC devices had. Things could be completely different now though, I'm not sure. But a few months ago the community in general still had no idea how sprint was doing this, someone had just found a slick way completely around it in HTC devices.
 
The chip set in the volt is snapdragon 400 same from moto g not moto x , I get what you are saying tho, sprint can still have it locked out something fierce even if it has the radios on deck, and you guys can clearly check it out if you got boot loader unlock and maybe flash radios with the gsm volt (l90) and build prop changes and maybe you guys can do it. If it has it, if it would be that simple if,if ,if. But give it a try
 
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