@netbsd @ltning @robey Could be. I believe we only ever shipped to Europe with DT in Germany, and Telefonica in Spain (I wanna say there was a smaller French presence as well, but memory is failing me). I _think_ even then Europe had relatively reasonable band standardization, so may be possible, if old Nokia GSM handset can connect, that a Hiptop could establish emergency voice CX.
Data would be 0% joy though.
There are multiple levels of authentication and handshake, especially when GPRS comes into play. When one starts a sidekick, and this was true for every model with any type of radio, there was a “dot” sequence one could observe on the connectivity status… stretching my memory, one dot was having a connection to the cell tower, two was establishing a PDP context (or whatever that was called across standards… basically, digital services were allowed), 3 dots was an actual routable TCP connection, followed by “G” which meant connection to the Danger service was established, sessions were synched, spice was flowing).
To get on the cell net, the carrier had to know that the IMSI/MSISDN was allowed, which required a lookup on a service we hosted. Further, each device was hardcoded to talk to a specific, per-carrier service, by address and key pair, and the service proxied all inet comms.
