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Compromise Struck On Cellphone Unlocking Bill
NotSanguine (1917456) writes The U.S. Senate has passed a bill (S.517) today, allowing users to unlock their phones when moving to another provider. From a recent article at thehill.com: "Consumers should be able to use their existing cell phones when they move their service to a new wireless provider," [Sen. Patrick] Leahy said in a statement. "Our laws should not prohibit consumers from carrying their cell phones to a new network, and we should promote and protect competition in the wireless marketplace," he said. [Sen. Chuck] Grassley called the bipartisan compromise "an important step forward in ensuring that there is competition in the industry and in safeguarding options for consumers as they look at new cell phone contracts." "Empowering people with the freedom to use the carrier of their choice after complying with their original terms of service is the right thing to do," he said. The House in February passed a companion bill sponsored on cellphone unlocking from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.)." Also at Ars Technica, as pointed out by reader jessepdx.
I don't understand how this is technically possible. don't you need a different type of phone to go from Verizon to ATT? like taking your TV to Japan.
A sudden outbreak of common sense? Pinch me, I must be dreaming.
Very few phones work on both CDMA2000 networks (Verizon and Sprint) and GSM networks (AT&T and T-Mobile), and they're hard to find in U.S. stores. Mail order doesn't let you hold the phone and get a feel for its size, weight, screen, and buttons before you buy.
True story:
My sisters's iphone screen broke. I asked her what she was doing with it, she said "Nothing, Apple wanted $100 to fix the screen but I just signed on for another contract with Verizon and got a free iphone."
This is how a lot of people think, and they're too naïve (or dumb) to realize the truth (no comment on sis). Her iphone is worth several hundred dollars, and if the phone is fixed for $100 she still comes out ahead. Verizon, meanwhile, will charge her more per month and actually, she's losing money on the deal.
Everybody knows the technology and even the frequency spectrums in use by the various carriers is mostly all different. You watch. The carriers now will say that they have to raise prices or even completely do away with contract subsidies in order to be competitive. As "do-gooder" efforts go, this is up there. Sounds great on paper, but utterly fails in it's intended consequence and/or has worse unintended consequences.
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
Except... phone unlocking has been legal in many other countries for years now with positive effects.
US is way to large for having only 3 (assuming the sprint & t-mobile merge goes through) big wireless providers. If you want competition you have to allow more players in the game.
So can Verizon and Sprint do voice and SMS over LTE with a carrier-neutral LTE phone, or would I have to buy a carrier-endorsed CDMA2000+LTE phone for that?
Phones like the iPhone have the ability to use most american, european, asian, and FAIK african cell phone bands, for years now. Most high end android phones have similar abilities (and some allow multiple sims).
My iphone has never been unable to communicate on a region's network, and I travel a lot, My (unlocked) iphone has worked on all four continents mentioned. Quite a few places in America, most countries in europe west of Czech (and who'd want to go east of there), South East Asia, and Morocco (OK, not all of Africa).
Of course, maybe el cheapo brand cell phones might differ, but if you are paying $20 for a cell, who cares if you can unlock it and use it again?
Unbundling phones and contracts would be a win. People would see the actual cost of their devices. Unfortunately, the carriers would keep the monthly rates the same, or even raise them.
Up here in Canada, we finally got rid of 3-year contract terms. The carriers raised prices almost the next day. Luckily my contract was only 2 years anyway, and it was worded such that plan/rate will stay the same for the forseeable future, provided I don't get a phone through the carrier (not that I planned to).
It simply boils down to greed at this point. These companies are raking in billions and prices seem to keep going up, with no increase in service or quality. :-/
The carriers now will say that they have to raise prices or even completely do away with contract subsidies in order to be competitive.
Then they'd have to compete with their MVNOs and T-Mobile USA, all of which have been itemizing the hardware and the service for years. Prepaid MVNOs have always sold the phone up front, and even before T-Mobile branded itself "the un-carrier", it had the SIM-only "Even More Plus" plan that offered a discount for bringing a compatible phone or buying one up front.
If you have an AT&T or T-Mobile iPhone, sure. If you have a Verizon or Sprint iPhone, what you say is unlikely. Verizon and Sprint use CDMA rather than GSM which isn't used pretty much anywhere than in the US. They don't support GSM at all, so they aren't going to work in any other country.
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If you're not financing the phone via Verizon, you have no need to pay Verizon anything. Instead you just use one of their subsidiary brands or affiliate for about $35 / month.
I don't remember the current names for Verizon, but as an example Sprint and Boost are the same company, same LTE network Boost is $35 / month. You'd only pay the Sprint contract price if you were paying off your "free" phone.
Not true. When I go to the US (or travel) I buy a prepaid sim card for local calls.
Verizon is able to sell you a sim card for your iphone if you have a 5 or later. If you have a 4S, you are right, but it's been some years since that was state of the art.
It's cheaper for cell phone manufacturers to make 1 chip for all the bands, then have to retool for each different cell provider
> It simply boils down to greed at this point
Greed and a whole lot of stupid. Sprint has two brands for the same company, Sprint brand and Boost.
Boost is $35. Sprint is $85 or whatever with a "free" $150 phone. People have the choice, and they choose to pay an extra $50 / month for 36 months = $1,800 for that phone. Not just uneducated people either. I bet someone will get all defensive and reply to this post with justifications of why it's not stupid of them to pay $1,800 for a $150 phone, and that person is a Slashdot user - probably a computer programmer or something.
When so many people choose to pay ten times as much as the phone is worth, it's no surprise someone will sell it to them.
It is flawed to think that MORE laws will fix a problem. If a problem exists, it is likely due to the fact that there are too many laws to begin with.
When it comes to laws, less is most definitely more.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
That's why almost everywhere in the US there is a monopoly on Cable TV and Telephone, which also mafically translates into a monopoly or biopoloy for Internet access and municipal fiber is supressed. Seems like those could be the actions of a money whoring jackss who wants the US to have crappy Intrnet, not someone who embaraces comptition.
Just saying.
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Meanwhile, the really important issues, such as the NSA spying on everyone are being ignored.
This is just a sop, aimed at geeks to get them to forget about Snowdon and many other important issues for a while, perhaps to make people think that the politicians actually care about what people think.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They fought like hell against this. They always support big companies because so many of us are minorities or poor. They hate us and want us to die. Fighting against allowing us to use the phones we own is just more proof of what their kind thinks of us.
This is kind of a double post, but it's important enough to warrant a separate post.
Unfortunately, Congress has dilly dallied on this issue for too long. We're now past the point where mandating carriers unlock phones will help. There are still phones which will work across a broad range of carriers, but they are now few and far between. Most of the newer phones are limited in their frequencies so they'll only work fully with one carrier. Take it to another carrier and you'll either suffer degraded service, or even lack certain service like LTE. So even if you can unlock your phone from the carrier, it won't do you any good because you'll lose 4g or even 3g capability if you try to use it with another carrier.
The only thing that will help now is a law mandating that carriers must provide service to any phone a customer brings with them that's capable of operating on their network. That will open up the markets so that manufacturers begin selling multi-carrier and world phones directly to customers (bypassing the carriers). You can still buy a phone from Verizon if you really want, and it'll be crippled so as not to work with any other carrier even if unlocked. But the smarter person would buy the version of the phone sold by the manufacturer at Best Buy or Amazon which supports enough frequencies that it'll work with any carrier. That's actually what Google did with the Nexus 5 - it supports enough frequencies to work on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and a bunch of other international carriers. It's technically capable of working on Verizon (with LTE in areas where Verizon provides band 4 - New York and Los Angeles from what I hear), but Verizon blacklists it so you can't use it on their network. What we need is a law making it illegal for Verizon to do that.
Over here basically the only phones that you get simlocked are prepaids, and even those are unlockable for free after a year. If you want them unlocked earlier you can pay a fee to the (virty) telco. That or you pay a shady shop a tenner while running the apparently not that big risk of a dead phone. Also, apparently simlocks are country-bound so a locked phone from the next country over would work fine on any network here, and vice versa. Sometimes there's upsides to having multiple different and not too large countries on the same continent.
Yeah, I've broken that law at least 50 times. It's simple as this, I spend $400 on a phone I'm going to do want with it whether they like like it or not.
This bill actually does very little. The DMCA is written very broadly, and has been commonly interpreted as to prohibit cell phone unlocking. Because Congress, in the 90s, when they enacted the stupid thing, was aware that the DMCA could go too far, but didn't want to be cautious or have to keep reexamining the law itself, they gave authority to the Library of Congress to add exceptions to it in specific cases. The process for these exceptions is that every three years, anyone who wants an exception has to plead their case. If found worthy, they get an exception. But the exception only lasts until the next rule making session, three years hence. Then it has to be reargued from scratch or lost.
Two rule making sessions ago, the Library of Congress found that cellphone unlocking was worthy of an exception. But in the most recent rule making session, they did not find it worthy, and the exception was lost; it went back to its default state of being illegal.
This law could have amended the DMCA to permanently allow cellphone unlocking. Or it could've directed the Library of Congress to always find that cellphone unlocking is allowed. But it does neither of these.
Instead it only reinstates the rule from two sessions ago for the remainder of the current session. Next year it will have to be argued again, from scratch, to the Library of Congress, or lost, again. And even if argued, it can be rejected, again.
This is less than useless. It's only a temporary patch, it doesn't even have an iota of long term effect (the rules don't take precedent into account, and this doesn't change it), and we've wasted all this effort getting it instead of something worthwhile.
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I can either pay AT&T $150 for 800meg roaming data. Or I can pay $7 in Singapore for a 1gig on a local sym. $30 in Japan for 1gig local sim. Etc.... I forgot the price in Italy but it was in a similar range. TMobile has their free international roaming but it's 2G which is really really slow.
Unlocking the phone isn't just about switching carriers
PS: So far I've just bought uncontracted unlocked phones.