Major US carriers announce principles for unlocking devices
techhive.com
techhive.com
If you think $200 buys you an iPhone, you're sadly deluded. "$200 with 2 year contract" means you haven't bought anything, you're still paying the mortgage with every phone bill. If you want to buy something and "do whatever you want with it", Apple, Google, and a host of others will sell you an unlocked phone. And it will cost a bit more than $200 (though the Nexus 5at $349 isn't too far off).
On the other hand, if you're fed up with your carrier and would like to switch, you're free to do so. I just did it with AT&T. Walked into a T-Mobile store, asked them to transfer our numbers. The next day I called AT&T and asked, "how much do I owe for the ETF?" I paid the $225/phone (that's how fed up with AT&T I was) over the phone with AT&T. Wait a few days for their accounting system to catch up, go to the web page and enter the IMEI for both phones, and two days later the phones are unlocked. Slapped the T-Mobile SIMs into the iPhones and we were on the air.
I just don't get the sentiment of "unlock my free-with-contract phone two months into my contract, you bastards!" It's not your phone. Now, if Verizon, Sprint, or $YOUR_CARRIER don't as readily unlock your phone as AT&T after you pay the ETF or your contract is up, I'll stand with you in your complaint. Otherwise, I don't see the issue.
To me, this just underlines how the GSM carriers are playing in a very different field than the CDMA carriers (especially after the T-Mobile refarm added 1900 MHz HSPA+ to their network and since new AT&T and T-Mobile phones both support LTE band 4).
Sure it is. You received a discount on the phone on the condition that you sign a separate contract which obligates you to pay the carrier a certain amount of money for the next 2 years, but that's a separate matter.
If you've bought a phone, you can do what you want with it. Separately, you may have to pay a penalty for breaking a contract (and that penalty would include the cost of the discount that you initially received), but that doesn't mean that the phone isn't yours.
This is a reasonable thing to want if you travel overseas and want to pop in a cheap local SIM card for the duration of your trip, instead of paying the absurd roaming charges.
The carrier lends you the money, you agree to pay it back, that's as far as their involvement goes. This is standard practice in Europe. You get a phone for cheap, you agree to pay monthly installments, you can throw the phone off a cliff or install BeOS on it, for all the carrier cares.
Unless, you actually interrupt the contract with AT&T, but in that case it's not much different than it is today, and you just pay the ETF and you're on your merry way.
Get a $200 iphone5 from AT&T, next day unlock it without paying ETF and get a cheap prepaid T-Mobile sim and never use the AT&T sim again; thus not paying AT&T's voice/data fees(and we all know they get you on overages). That'd be a problem for the current business model. To make up for the lack of overage-charges they'd have to make the phones more expensive or raise the monthly minimum charge.
NOTE: I understand the awkward issue of travel though. I made the mistake of using my AT&T sim in Nigeria once. Maybe smartphones should accept difference SIMs after it determines its in a country other than where it was bought. But of course, then I go to amazon.co.uk and order an iPhone5 to be sent to America. ;)
Huh? You would still have to pay your monthly contract to AT&T even if you no longer used the AT&T sim.
Caveat Emptor and everything, but routinely exploiting ignorant customers should not be a business plan.
There's no issue with unlocking your phone and using T-Mobile while continuing to pay your AT&T bill (except to your wallet). Nor is that scenario outlandish - just replace T-Mobile with a foreign carrier while traveling.
And they will! You can throw your AT&T sim away and never touch it again. But you will still pay them the $70 a month or whatever you were paying them before, unless you actually break the contract with them and pay the ETF. AT&T doesn't lose in either situation.
Last I heard, they usually demand that you purchase certain insurance coverages... And insurers usually have their own rules about what you an and can't do with your car (if you want your insurance to be affordable anyway).
At a typical retail markup, perhaps ~$400 is about right.
For those interested> Teardown Shows iPhone 5S Costs at Least $199 to Build, $173 for the 5C
http://allthingsd.com/20130924/teardown-analysis-shows-iphon...
For example, you might want to make sure your phone is unlocked so when you take a week trip overseas you can pop in another sim card to use in another country, but you might keep your existing contract with AT&T active because you'll keep using it when you come home.
I don't really see any logical reason why having a service contract with a cell company should prevent you from doing this.
1) unlocking the phone
2) killing the contract with AT&T
Until now to "unlock your phone", you had to kill your contract with AT&T, and then move over to T-Mobile. But now you'll be able to unlock the phone for free - while maintaining the contract with AT&T - and still be able to use T-mobile. So you'll be paying both contracts (if for some reason you want to use both - like say you have family on AT&T's network, etc).
This is very common in Europe. People use 2 networks on the same phone all the time, by switching the SIMs. And I think in Asia, too, because in both these regions dual-SIM phones are on the rise.
There are plenty of great uses to unlock your phone even if you still want to keep the primary contract, like travelling abroad or maintaining multiple SIMs on a single phone.
Why is the text in your post not completely faded away yet? There must me more of your type around here than I thought.
Where was it said that if you unlock your subsidized phone that you no longer had to pay for it? The fact that it is subsidized means that you are under contract for it. Break the contract and what happens? You pay for the rest of the phone plus more in early termination fees. It's YOUR PHONE once you sign the contract and you are going to pay for it one way or another. Stop paying and you are going to have collection agencies stalking you, won't be able to register your car or get any type of credit, and your wages garnished.
Don't ever have pin stripes painted on that sports car you are paying off. Don't ever replace the flooring on the home you are mortgaging. Try logic sometime.
Assume that's true, for the moment.
That doesn't mean they get to use unrelated laws in weird ways to stop unlocking. Either they lobby to get a law introduced, or they improve their locking technology, or they stop selling phones like they are.
But abusing copy-right protection and anti-piracy laws is sub-optimal.
It's not whenever you want - just are just clearly documenting when they will let you. For the actual info read here:
http://www.ctia.org/docs/default-source/fcc-filings/ctia-let...
In short:
Prepaid: 1 year.
Postpaid: When your contact is up.
Military: Upon deployment.
"Carriers reserve the right to charge non-customers/non-former-customers a reasonable fee for unlocking requests".
I bought my iPhone straight from Apple, unlocked, to avoid it. Are there phones you pay for in full, up-front, that are still only available locked?
The point is that the carrier also subsidizes the cost of the phone and hopes to recoup it through the fees. But since there are no guaranteed payments, the subsidy amount is usually low and the phones accordingly cheap.
Of course, still unfortunate that I have to pay the fee, though I'd rather have this than in states where you still have to wait until your contract is up.
I'm not sure why you paid specifically $50 (as the cost should be specified at the time of contract), as the policy was supposed to be 100% in effect as of December 3rd. Unless of course I'm mistaken and Fido changed their policies before this was introduced. Thankfully though, you can get your device unlocked in Canada after up to 90 days, at your carrier's discretion [1]. (Though really, forcing a 90 day wait won't really affect much in the long run if consumers start using this clause, so I expect most will just be willing to unlock the phone fairly quickly as time goes on)
I wouldn't care so much if there were plenty of other affordable ways to get a phone and coverage, but sim locking is so prevalent in the US that it's unavoidable in many cases, and most phones you can get unlocked are incredibly expensive.
(I'll save you the effort: they don't. None have sufficient market share that anyone would go after them and there are enough BYO provides to look at that there's no way you'll win a claim you don't have choice.)