Japanese phone on Telus

I have a Japanese cell phone that I'd like to use with my Telus account. It's a CDMA phone and was advertised as being able to work in Canada, i.e. with global roaming through a Japanese service provider. The phone is by Kyocera, model A1013K, and originally used with au KDDI.

Telus has told me that they can't put the phone on their network because they don't have (and won't add) its ESN to their database, and even if they did, they wouldn't have the "programming code" to change its phone number.

Does anybody know if this is absolutely true, or if there might be some way to get around it? I can't help but think that Telus should be able to provide service to this phone, since it's Telus's network I would have been using if I came to Canada from Japan for a vacation and just depended on that global roaming I mentioned before.

Unfortunally it's true. You cannot use a phone from another provider on the TELUS Mobility Network if the ESN is not in our Database. I work for TELUS Mobility and we have tried to add phones by calling into our call center and they said that they could not add it to the database. Wish there was a way to do it sometimes.

Well, too bad they won't add other phones to their database even when the technologies are compatible, because if they did I wouldn't be so ready to jump ship. The DAY my contract runs out, I'm jumping ship to another provider (whether they allow me to use my Japanese phone or not... I have not once been happy with anything Telus has done for me, aside from cute pigs in their advertisements).

dump telus pay the 20 a months for happiness, telus is the worse provider and their network does not support alot of modern functions what are they going to do with the new playback tones? they are already havin a problem with downloading ringtones

If only I weren't a poor student.... if I had $200 to spare, I probably would have left a year ago. At least, in Montreal, they do seem to have the best converage.

I had a telus phone and like 1 month after i got it it wouldn't turn on and i found the coverage wasn't the best so i switched to bell