[Galaxy Note 3 General] midnite_blue:
2 types of NetworkLocks... part 1

Hi, samaliset

Glad to hear it!

With all the confusion about region locking -- and with Samsung not specifying how it's been changing region locking through FW updates -- it's true that you can't really be sure an out-of-region sim will work until you put it in and try a local call.

I remember your post from early Oct telling us that the Samsung France hotline rep you spoke with told you that your phone wouldn't work outside Europe without roaming. I know you're glad that's not true, as are we all!

---------- Post added at 05:23 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:31 AM ----------

For years we've been conditioned to thinking of sim locking & unlocking in terms of the CSC-whitelist protocol used to lock a phone to a single network provider. If you try breaking a lock to a specific carrier, you can test your success by using any sim that's not theirs. You know the whitelist lock has been unlocked if any other sim now works.

We have to think differently with region locking because it uses an inverse model. When you first get a region-locked 'European' phone, a French sim card will work, but not because the '208' MCC for France is on a whitelist of 42 European MCC's that will work... it works because it isn't on the list of 63 MCC's around the world that won't. You can't test whether or not your phone has been region unlocked without trying one of the sims from the blacklist.

There was initially a misconception that region locking meant that one's 'European' phone was locked to the region and that the only sims that would initially work were from the 40 countries inside Samsung's 'Europe' (Ireland & the UK each have two MCC's). That was mistaken... the sim cards from 94 other countries (plus numerous territories) would have worked in your phone immediately upon taking it out of its box... that is, you wouldn't have gotten a lock screen.

Instead, region locking has meant two things, one having to do with locking (during the automatic activation process), and the other having to do with unlocking (during an automatic registration process).

Locking

. If you're within Samsung's 'Europe' and buy a Note 3 through their authorized distribution network, you'll likely get a phone with a blacklist of 63 MCC's embedded in the CSC. Put in a sim and turn on the phone, and an activation process within your phone will check the sim against the blacklist. If the sim card's MCC is one of 169 non-blacklisted MCC's, your phone will work fine (though you may not have network service). If, on the other hand, your phone finds a match between the sim and the CSC blacklist, it will temporarily lock and ask for a code... but unlock again when you put in a non-blacklisted MCC.

Locking proved to be a reliable process.

Unlocking

. Unlocking, however, often didn't work so well.

In addition to the hack which Chainfire wrote for rooted N9005's (with specific FW builds) and which has been a great solution for many, there are two official ways of unlocking. One is getting the unlock code from a Samsung service center. When this has actually been tried, most service centers have had no idea what we were talking about... and not all of those who were in the know would fork up the code. To this void, puman.ru and other websites stepped in to help, for a fee.

The other unlocking process -- the one that was supposed to work by default -- involves some sort of measure of use. Some of us on xda believe an OTA registration (or attestation) process gets looped into this. This is when, with a phone that's region-locked to 'Europe,' you need one of those 42 European sims. If you activate your phone with one of those, a secret automatic process was supposed to happen. I believe this is where the unlocking process broke down... and that it was this part of the process that Samsung changed this fall about the time of MJ7 thru MJ9.

Originally, it wasn't clear where the phone had to physically be at the time of registration (which Samsung reps have typically lumped in with 'activation'). Some reps said the phone could be anywhere... some said it had to be within the home region... and some said it had to be within the country it was intended for.

We may never know what was actually the case for the pre-MJ7 Region Lock #1. For Region Lock #2, I believe 'country' is, imprecisely, the answer... that is, the phone must be adequately proximal to the proper server a) for the MCC and the use-test results to be uploaded (along with God knows what else) and, if the test results and MCC match certain criteria (now 5 mins. of voice), b) for the unlock code to then be downloaded.

---------- Post added at 05:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 05:23 AM ----------

So it would have been a big surprise, samaliset, if your Canadian sim had failed. Canada's '302' MCC isn't on the European blacklist, which you can confirm by looking in your customer.xml file. (The Canadian market isn't blocked in 'the Middle East' blacklist, either.)

Hopefully, you truly are unlocked now, though your experiment hasn't shown that. You won't know for sure until you try your phone with a sim using one of the 63 MCC's of the 62 blacklisted markets (India has two MCC's.)