For decades there has been endless policy wrangling over whether “unlocking your phone” (removing restrictions allowing you to take the device with you to another carrier) should be allowed. Giant carriers have generally supported onerous phone locks because it hampers competition by making it harder to switch providers. Consumer rights groups and the public broadly support unlocked devices.
This is still a thing in the US?
Canada abolished that crap years ago… Phones are sold unlocked, and any remaining locked phones are required to be unlocked free of charge just by asking the Carrier.
It’s extremely hard to just move to another phone or internet company. You have to threaten, lie, waste 10 hours, etc. Internet and phone companies have turned us all into “let me speak to your manager” types, we didn’t start out that way.
Not a thing in the UK either, perhaps due to an EU law. It’s quite nice buying a handset and shoving any SIM in.
It’s only a thing if you are on some form of lease plan where you don’t own it outright. Pretty much every carrier in the US sells phones on a monthly payment for the device, which usually is just the cost of the device spread over 30 months, etc. While the device is still not paid off its carrier locked. After its paid off you need to jump through a few hoops but it’s honestly not too hard. I’m not sure what the FCC is hoping to accomplish here, it’s a similar arrangement to leasing/financing a vehicle, where the dealership holds the title till it’s bought/paid off.
There are cases other than what you mentioned where the carrier refuses to unlock. During 2021, AT&T forced a phase out of 3G and provided allowed customers to get a free upgrade phone in the process. As a prepay customer, I took the phone but jumped ship to a different carrier. I tried to get them to unlock the phone earlier this year and they refused. There was no contract/lease involved, but they didn’t like that I didn’t remain a customer with them for (I think it was) 180 days after that.
I imagine people will have to start purchasing their phones outright. This will probably affect the lower class’ purchasing power disproportionately, but personally, I don’t see a problem with saving to buy rather than purchasing “on credit” so to say.
I think that would also see an eventual reduction in device costs eventually as more people will be unable to pay the premium costs of a flagship device. Or the mid tier devices will start selling more, androids popularity will probably rise too, matching the rest of the world
Certainly corporations will have to find a way to provide more affordable options until they can figure out another way to assure investors of the “infinite” wealth growth plan.
There are loads and loads of phones on eBay. You will quickly find sellers who do this as a business, not just some dude ditching his old phone.
They have consistent quality ratings (A, B, C, etc.) and pics of the product you will receive.
Bought my last 6 phones that way. No way I’d agree to a carrier provided, $800 phone.
I’m not purchasing expensive phones either, but I think it’s important to note that this will probably have a significant affect on the industry (mostly in the US) and I’m not usually optimistic of how these changes affect the consumer in the long run.
We still have to live in the real world. Someone still has to make those new phones that you eventually hawk.
When shopping for phones to buy outright, I remember seeing that you can buy phones locked to specific carriers. Supposedly different carriers use some different bands and so the carrier specific version has the corresponding antenna/receiver.
It’s been a number of years since I last regularly worked in cell phone repair, but some models of phones were physically made in different varieties with different antennas for different networks.
It wasn’t even possible to ‘unlock’ those phones for other networks, short of replacing the logic board and antennas.
Allowing root access for Android phones free of charge is a start
And the finish line…?
Like, install antennas to connect to any network…
Phones are also small computers, and while its wireless chipset may only be compatible with certain carriers, that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be allowed to install whatever I want on it.
Try a Galaxy S5…
Antennas are proprietary to different networks.
The antenna isn’t chipset agnostic? TIL. I normally work with radio transmitters for LoRa and Bluetooth where the antenna is just a wire connected to a radio chipset module so I assumed 4g/5g were the same
Yeah, I don’t think there are many models of phones with proprietary antennas, but there are, or at least were a couple models.