Prepaid, No Contract Plans for CDMA Unlocked iPhone?

[jmine83]

I am currently a Straight Talk user with an unlocked iPhone 3GS and the phone and plan works great. I am, however, definitely planning to jump on buying the iPhone 5 when the time is right. My question though is whether or not to buy a GSM or CDMA based phone.

To the best of my knowledge based on my research, I have found that Straight Talk is the best plan if you have a GSM phone with regards to value for the performance you are getting; i.e. $45 a month for everything unlimited. I would even be willing to pay lower for prepaid restricted performance if there is such a thing. As an imaginary example, pay like $30 a month prepaid for a fixed amount of voice, text, and data usage.

If there is such a cheap fixed plan, either GSM or CDMA, please let me know.

But in general, I want to know if there is a comparable no contract service to Straight Talk, but on the CDMA network for an unlocked CDMA iPhone. From what I see from S.T., they do not support CDMA.

 

[CyBeRino]

The way I understand it, there's no such thing as an "unlocked CDMA phone".

Unlike GSM where you can take an unlocked phone and stick a SIM card in it, CDMA has no such mechanism so you need the carrier to activate a handset on their network. Which apparently they are unwilling to do if you did not buy it from them.

This is one of the reasons why so many people booed Apple's idea for an integrated software-based SIM.

But I hear Cricket sells prepaid iPhones and they use CDMA. Maybe one day Ting will too.

Oh by the way, AT&T will tell you otherwise but with a bit of tinkering, goPhone is perfectly usable on iPhones. It just requires you load a provisioning profile with a different APN set.