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CRTC Bans Locked Phones and Carrier Unlocking Fees (mobilesyrup.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Canada's telecom regulator has announced that as of December 1st, 2017, all individual and small business wireless consumers will have the right to have their mobile devices unlocked free of charge upon request, while all newly purchased devices must be provided unlocked from that day forward. The decision came following the February 2017 review of the Wireless Code, where unlocking fees took center stage, with some parties (like Freedom Mobile) advocating for the abolishing of those fees altogether, some arguing they should remain as an important theft deterrent and the CRTC suggesting the fee should be far under the current $50 CAD standard. "The Wireless Code has helped make the wireless market more dynamic to the benefit of Canadians. While they appreciate the Code, they told us loudly and clearly that it could be more effective," said Jean-Pierre Blais, chairman of the CRTC, in a press release.
Now if we didn't have the most expensive cell service in the world....
People think the USA is getting ripped off when it comes to cell service. They have nothing on us.
I've been using Unlocked BLU Handsets in Canada and the US on occasion. While I like this, for the USian audience out there: Ban CDMA. CDMA is one of the biggest carrier lock in scams out there. CDMA is only used in the US Now, and it was discontinued. I'm afraid to travel to the US Now, but when I used too more often, the proliferation of CDMA Towers meant that anywhere outside Large Metropolitan areas can you get good GSM coverage and there are many US Rural areas with NO GSM coverage - only CDMA.
CDMA should be considered unacceptable in the modern world for a first world.
CDMA is effectively a scheme to prevent users from switching carriers or bringing their own devices to networks, forcing them to finance ultra expensive Phones.
It used to be that carriers used subsidized phones as a justification to lock you in to a contract when effectively they were just financing your phone (At an awful interest rate if you did the math)
The FCC and FTC in the US started getting on the carrier's cases about this issue and you'll notice that now phone financing is a separate agreement that spells out it's terms and conditions clearly.
It's better this way. The consumer gets what they want, the companies get what they want, and finance companies make some money too.
Carrier locking in the US, though, still needs to go away.
this type of corporate slavery should never have been allowed in the first place
it's never really been a free market, face the facts
I can't wait to see how the carriers manage to interpret this rule in the most customer-hostile way possible. Maybe they'll create a special "speaking to phone unlocking agent" fee.
Log in or piss off.
Thank you, CRTC. This ruling was long overdue!
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Fortunately in the USA corporation ARE people, my friend, so we won't have mandated unlocked phones foisted upon us.
can some of this sensibility be exported to the south?
Honestly, This is the best reason why you cant let businesses go along without regulation.
If companies do asshole things like locking a phone, then they deserve industry wide regulation and fines.
So many people wail about "regulation is killing business" No assholes that run companies are killing business.
Say no to assholes in management positions
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Funny that Freedom Mobile says that they are against unlock fees. When I got a new phone about a month back, they told me there would be a fee to unlock the phone. Likely they don't want other carriers to charge to unlock their phones to make it easier for customers to switch to their system. However, they are doing the exact same thing.
The whole reason there are locks in the first place is that the cell phone is usually paid for as part of the monthly bill. Putting a lock on it gives some assurance that the carrier will receive whatever money they are owed as part of the contract before the customer moves on to a new carrier.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Phones that are included in packaged plans that are not paid for up front are leased and therefore are still owned by the supplier.
Nearly all implementations of the data service in GSM 3G (UMTS, HSDPA) is wideband CDMA.
CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. GSM was designed (by committee) to use TDMA - each phone takes turns communicating with the tower. That was OK for voice, but absolutely destroyed data bandwidth because each phone got an equal slice of the bandwidth even if it didn't need it. CDMA allows every phone to transmit simultaneously, and the tower distinguishes them because each phone uses orthogonal codes. Kinda like two people writing on the same sheet of paper, one vertically, one horizontally. CDMA interprets other devices transmissions as an increase in the noise floor (decrease in signal to noise ratio), so each phone's bandwidth scales automatically. If 10 phones are transmitting simultaneously, each phone gets 1/t0h the bandwidth. If only one phone is transmitting, the noise floor is lower and it gets all the bandwidth.
This is why CDMA carriers rolled out 3G data a year before GSM. The U.S. allowed both standards to compete, and CDMA absolutely destroyed GSM in data service. GSM threw in the towel and licensed CDMA from Qualcomm, and needed the extra year to come up with the specs and hardware. This is also why 3G GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time. They had a TDMA radio for voice, and a wCDMA radio for data. CDMA phones had only one radio, and it could only be used for voice or data, not both simultaneously.
CDMA for voice is used mainly in only the U.S. But if the U.S. had gone along with GSM, our data speeds today would probably be around 300 kbps - 1 Mbps. And LTE probably wouldn't exist. Most implementations of LTE use OFDMA - orthogonal frequencies as opposed to orthogonal codes in CDMA. CDMA served as the proof of theory that this crazy orthogonal signaling stuff really did work when scaled up to the size of a nationwide network. Without that proof, people wouldn't have been willing to put in the time and money into developing LTE. (OFDMA requires more processing to extricate the orthogonal signals than CDMA. Up until about 2010, the processors needed for OFDMA used too much power to be of practical use in a device designed to operate for at least 12 hours on battery. My old Galaxy S supported Sprint's WiMAX which was also OFDMA, and it would only last about 4 hours if I was using WiMAX.)
The time-limited nature of TDMA is also why GSM coverage is worse in rural areas. Because the timeslices are synchronized and a constant length, each TDMA tower's range is limited by the speed of light multiplied by the duration of the timeslice (IIRC this is about 35 km). CDMA has no such restrictions, so in a wide-open rural area with little noise and few obstructions, a single CDMA tower can cover a lot more area than a GSM TDMA tower. TDMA was just a bad idea overall, and it was stupid for GSM to standardize on it.
Power abhors competition. It doesn't matter what form this power takes. When you have strong government, government gets blamed. Where you lack strong government, factional violence gets blamed.
There's a principle in computer science that you can solve any problem by adding another layer of indirection, except for too many layers of indirection.
There's a principle in politics that you have nothing to fear but fear itself.
There ought to be an economic principle that you can solve any problem by enabling more competition, except for the competition to destroy competition.
Power abhors competition.
Unfortunately, economists waste too much of their brain power on ideology and fail to spot the obvious.
Now nothing makes government power intrinsically benign, but it is easier to point to. (What does Wall Street contribute, exactly, that benefits the economy enough to justify raking in 1/6 off all corporate profit in America?)
In a country with strong public institutions, being easier to point to can make government more benign than diffuse, libertarian oligarchy.
Hence libertarianism abhors strong public institutions.
The bottom line here is that competition itself is subject to systems theoretic scarcity constraints. These are especially hard to point to, but they nevertheless exist.
The next Hayek will be the guy who figures out how to write this down in compelling equations.
Hopefully, they will limit themselves to just shouting across the US-Canada border.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Worth noting is that this decision has come down on the last working day of CRTC Chairman Jean-Pierre Blais. What a great parting gift to the carriers after all their years of extorting every possible dollar from Canadians.
Fare thee well, JP Blais, and thanks for the solid!
I'm glad to live close to the U.S. border so that I can use Roam Mobility as needed to get around the hideous roaming fees charged by the Canadian carriers.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
I love this country, I honestly feel protected by my government. Its a good feeling, and its not the weed. :)
[($)]
If you buy your phone before December 1st 2017 ....then after that date they have to unlock it free. All new phones must be unlocked when bought!
In what way is a locked phone a theft deterrent? Other than reducing it's potential resale value, which a thief won't find out until it is stolen?
If trade is really free, does this mean I can order a Canadian phone from anywhere in North America, including the USA? I'm guessing not... because some animals are more free than others.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Or is mobilesyrup.com somehow supposed to be an official spokesperson for the CRTC?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'