This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
It won't last, oligopolies are buying out mvnos to consolidate further. Maybe anti trust fear will halt them but doubtful.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the way. Go buy a cheap phone when you get there and screw AT&FEE
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.
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.
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.
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.
It'll lead to higher prices meaning they'll charge more lol
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.
