New Type Of Sim...

I work for ATT Wireless and, as most of you know, we are merging with Cingular. Starting (supposedly) at the end of the month, plans are going to be merged together and what not, HOWEVER, we were informed that there is a new sim card called the "64k Sim" which allows for the phones to use both cingular and attws information. To go with this, all phones sold from "Day One" forward are going to supposedly have special software in them that allow them to only pull from these special 64k sims. I asked the tech guy at the meeting if these phones will be able to be unlocked from those kinds of sims, or if customers with previously unlocked phones can use this sim in their phone with their service w/ the new company. The tech guy (who would have no reason to lie to us) said that there is no way to unlock the new softwared phones and that there is no way for an already unlocked phone to use these sims, forcing customers (and employees alike) to have to purchase brand new phones and sims to start new service with this combined company, or if they wish to change anything on their already existing account.

My question is, has anyone had any experience or any additional knoweledge about these new sims/phone software and if there is a way to not only get around that, but if there's a way to mod the old phones to use these new sims?

Man, I have heard a lot of speculation about the at&t buyout from cingular. I also know that some of the people who have been telling these rumors are probaly smoking more than cigarettes. What I dont get is why people think a simple sim card will fix the network issue. Rogers here in canada added new spectrum (cell ids) to its network and i didnt need a new sim card to access it. So why should cingular blue or cingular orange customers need this new sim card to access the cingular brown network? basically listen to me, cus I dont want to have to repeat this information 100 times. Cingular will take the AT&T towers that exists in an area where cingular does not have coverage, and convert it into a cingular Network ID, then it would confiure the cell tower id to the equivalent of that too. Some areas will probaly have an overlapped tower, ie: cingular and at&t tower in the same proximity, so cingular will eventualy dismantle these towers, but in the meantime, it woudl not make sense to turn them into cingular towers, so they will probaly keep them as at&t. then an over the air update will be sent to your phone's sim, and it will tell your phone that the towers are part of the local coverage and your phone will register fine on them. It will be just exactly the same situation as if cingular were to erect new towers, so you wont need to manually go into your network scan menu or anythnig like that.

as for the sim card, it is basically a 64k sim, and it would have the same MCC MNC as cingulars network in the united states. But what i dont get is why cingular is using more than one MNC in different part of the states, if they fixed this from day one, they wouldnt have problems. AT&T uses 310-38, for all markets of the usa. but cing has different areas for different markets they bought into, correct? so the question here is will the new sim cards be dependant on certain areas, or will they be one universal mcc mnc for all of the United States of America.