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I don’t play this game. I buy my own unlocked phone and find prepaid cell service at a fraction of the cost.
This is the way
One of the three carriers in Canada is about to do away with prepaid entirely in December. That said, I have a pretty affordable monthly plan and I buy my phones outright.
Is it not normal that you can use any phone with any abonnement?
Yes, but some carriers lock the phones they sell so they only work with their subscriptions.
Basically, AT&T argues against it saying it’ll force them to innovate and be competitive with other services.
Won’t anyone think of the poor telecom shareholders??
All I see with that statement is, "Please Federal Government, hit me with your breakup hammer."
hit me with your breakup hammer...
hard
Just make carrier locking illegal and have customers pay the actual price, now it's just hidden costs to the consumer.
It isn't been a hidden cost for a while. Phone companies sell the phones at full price, but consumers want the 2 year 0% APR financing.
If consumers bought the phones from a third party, there'd be absolutely no reason to lock the phone to a carrier. But when carriers also provide the financing, there's an incentive to keep them on the service until the bill is paid. Screw that.
If I could drop $1000+ for the device all at once, I already would be getting them carrier unbranded.
Then don't buy a $1k device, and instead buy something you can afford?
Otherwise, there are tons of buy now, pay later services, so you could just use any of those.
Not go into debt to upgrade something that actually in most cases doesn't need upgrading. What a amazing thought.
Yup. I upgraded my phone because it ran out of software updates (had for >3 years). My new phone cost <$400 and has >5 years of software support, if the hardware lasts that long. A $1k device is not necessary and is a luxury item, and you shouldn't go into debt for luxuries...
https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/contact/phone/q19.htm
Canada:
First, locked phones are a thing of the past. Effective December 1, 2017, service providers will have to offer unlocked devices to their customers.
What are the benefits of having an unlocked device?
An unlocked device can be used on other networks, which means that you will be able to switch providers and keep the same phone. That means more flexibility for you, the consumer.
I want to reiterate this. Even second hand phones. Find the carrier and call them. They legally have to oblige.
I remember trying to do this when this first became law. Bell told me no anyways.
Same! Except it was Koodo. Told me that they were “exempt” from the ruling.
I accidentally broke my Sony after drowning it a little too hard. I remember going into a AT&T store at a mall in the us and having this literal conversation.
"Do you have the Pixel 7 Pro?"
"Yes! We do."
"Does it come carrier unlocked?"
"No..."
"Thanks for your time"
I usually just buy my phone directly from a big box store never from a carrier
Same, and phones are good enough now that I feel perfectly comfortable buying a device that is two generations behind. I recently saved nearly $1300 by doing this ($1800 when it was new; I paid $550), and the phone feels just as fast and responsive as a brand new flagship.
I get all mine on eBay. There are some big-time sellers who are pros at reselling old phones and give an honest A-D rating. Same goes for PCs. Buy from the pros if you're wary of the average Joe.
Exactly. I bought my Pixel 8 refurbished on eBay, and everything came as expected, and honestly in better shape than I was expecting. Find someone with good reviews, check for recent bad reviews, and then go for it. I paid <$400 and feel like I got a really good deal (I also stacked w/ an eBay discount, which rocked).
I bought my last phone new from Google Fi (fantastic deal) then transferred to a cheaper service after the required time, and the two phones I got before that (my SO's and mine) were also from eBay. It's a great way to go, just be careful and don't buy something at the absolute lowest price since there's probably a reason they're advertised cheaper than the pack.
I ended up just ordering one from a friend's amazon account.
Out of curiosity, I would imagine that if someone goes the carrier-financing route, they'd still be on the hook for the cost of the phone even if they jumped to a different carrier? I don't want to sound like I'm in support of at&t, but it doesn't seem terribly unreasonable to keep a customer in place while they still have a balance on the hardware, or is there something else I'm missing?
Yeah. I always saw it as a trade-off. "Here's a cheaper or zero interest loan for a phone. You get this in exchange for paying us a cell phone bill for the next year or two."
What pusses me off is that none of the big three give any discount if you have your own phone. If the guy next to me gets $600 off his cell phone purchase and pays $80/month, how come I still pay $80/month with my own device?
Wow, I pay £10 a month for unlimited calls/text and 45GB data. Not even on contract, it's a monthly rolling bill, I can cancel at any time. The reason for this, there's pretty good competition between carriers/NVMOs in the UK at the moment, driving prices down.
I agree with what you're saying. They got the phone from Carrier A with the expectation the phone plan went with it. Once the phone is paid off, they can take the phone to Carrier B. Since they phone is basically bought on an interest free loan, the interest is recouped by the plan, and the collateral for not paying is a loss of the phone plan and use of the phone. To leave the plan, payoff the phone.
That does require that, the moment the phone is paid off, it should be automatically unlocked. There shouldn't have to be a request or additional waiting. And the customer should be notified that it's unlocked along with an explanation that they can now use the phone with any other provider.
Automatic unlocking sounds like a pipe dream given the American business landscape, but there shouldn't be any barriers to unlocking, even if the customer has to request it. People are likely stuck in the mindset of yesteryear where phones weren't transferrable between carriers (especially with band compatibility of GSM vs CDMA), and I'd wager that many people don't even realize it's possible these days. I can't say I blame carriers for wanting to maintain the illusion, and I don't necessarily think they should be forced to advertise it, but the option should be plain and simple for those who want to exercise the right.
I’m not from the US, but where I live it’s either (or a combination of):
In any case, you get an unlocked phone.
Like when you buy the thing sooner? Cuz we would remove all the bloatware they add. They used to do that to computers and we just stopped buying those shit things and building our own.
Shit man. I used to work at a Circuit City at the height of bloated shitty Celeron PCs.
We would be forced to sell a "system optimization" on each PC we sold. It was just a script that uninstalled a few of the bloatware items and tweaked the animation speed to make the customer think we did something incredible.
I fucking hated that job!
I made a lot of money when I had a shop reloading machines. After a clean install without all the crap the manufactures and some of the stores installed the customer was happy with the speed increase.
This literally happened to me recently. Was going to Germany for 2 weeks and wanted to use a cheap eSIM for data only. I asked them if they could unlock my phone so I could do this, and they said no since it’s not paid off. I still have a new months left to pay it off, and didn’t wanna drop $250 to do that so I just had to pay the international data plan. $12(maybe $10? Can’t remember) a day, 10 day maximum charge per cycle so I’ll pay $120 for mine and $60 for my partners. Instead of the $11 30gb data plan I wanted. I’m never buying a phone from a carrier again, I will always just buy it outright from now on. It was a stupid situation.
Also the data roaming sucked, each time we moved from one provider network to another we had to restart our phones as the data didn’t wanna work…
A burner phone with a hotspot would have been cheaper.
This is the way. Go buy a cheap phone when you get there and screw AT&FEE
Personally I always always buy phones with two sim slots. It's super practical if you travel semi-often.
Idk about apple, but basically all of the mid-range androids have this feature. I guess this is about the US though, so it's probably Apple.
It'll lead to higher prices meaning they'll charge more lol
Capitalist companies can be awfully communist when it comes to our cellphone.
That’s giving them too much credit. I think they want it to be theirs.
Meanwhile Australia is going to fore carriers to disconnect customers with devices that are not guaranteed to support emergency calling over volte. As there are still unsolved problems with detecting that, the providers fall back to only allowing devices they provided themselves.
When I bought my current phone they sent me one that was locked. I called at&t to try and get it resolved and they told me to pound sand because I'm not a customer. Huge ordeal that could have been solved in 2 minutes.
