MetroPCS is having a party and they want you to BYOP(Bring you own phone). Of course, they have phones they will sell you too, but they welcome you to bring your own phone if you like (and you will want to if you want something hot, their offerings are slim). This is a CDMA carrier, so it’s not as simple as bringing your own phone, slapping their Sim card in it and moving right along. You have to call or go online with Verizon and Sprint and they normally won’t allow you to bring a phone from another carrier onto their network.

MetroPCS’s network covers 14 large cities, including Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas. It had 4.4 million subscribers at the end of March. MetroPCS is allowing this though.

Its network uses the Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, technology. CDMA carriers maintain databases of the serial numbers carried by phones that they have sold, and except for Pocket and now MetroPCS, won’t activate phones with other numbers. They generally say that they won’t let any phones on to their networks without putting that model through rigorous testing. This applies even to phones that are functionally identical to their own, like the many slight variations of the Motorola Razr sold by different carriers.

So if you live in one of these cities that MetroPCS covers and want to use that hot new Samsung Phone on Sprint’s Network, you can get it working on their network.

Source: Seattle PI via Crunchgear