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Verizon is Locking Its Phones Down To Combat Theft (cnet.com)
Verizon is taking an extra step to protect its phones. CNET: The nation's largest wireless carrier said Monday that it would begin locking the phones it sells to consumers, which will prevent them from using a SIM card from another carrier. Initially, the phones will be unlocked as soon as a customer signs up and activates the service. But later in the spring, the company will begin the practice of keeping the phone locked for a period of time after the purchase -- in line with the rest of the industry. Verizon said it is doing this to deter criminals from stealing phones, often on route to retail stores or from the stores themselves.
This isn't about "protecting consumers". It's about killing off the secondary phone market. After you upgrade, you're stuck with a brick you can't sell. All those people who buy used phones will be forced to purchase new - or rooted ones.
I find this highly unlikely. They're locking in their customers under the guise of deterring theft.
If the "period of time after the purchase" is 3 to 12 months, as it is with T-Mobile, it won't affect someone who upgrades and sells on his old handset after one or two years.
Good to know, as a verizon customer who was toying with replacing my 8 year old phone with a new one, I guess I will look for another provider also.
I just bought a new phone and had to order a Canadian model so that not only would it be carrier-unlocked, but also bootloader unlocked. Since I still have that crazy idea that when I buy a phone, that I own the phone and the carrier shouldn't be able to dictate what I can and can't install on it, copy off from it for backups to keep my data safe, etc.Or dictate when I need to buy a new phone because they've arbitrarily decided to stop providing OS updates for it, leaving me unsafe and left behind.
Yes it's 1 (soon, 2) models "behind" from the latest and greatest but it's 2 models NEWER than my current phone, because I'm not a sucker who falls for marketing pressure trying to convince me I need a new phone every year when I clearly do not.
If computer manufacturers pulled the same shit on computers, people would've been up in arms. Though we're watching Apple and now Microsoft try and take advantage of how users are being fucked and desensitized by consumer-hostile cell carrier practices, and infect PCs with the same anti-consumer practices inch by inch. Don't you dare tell me what OS I can and can't run on the hardware I bought, or what apps I can or can't use, or what data of MINE I'm allowed to copy and back up.
(cue all the trolls who jump in and claim that rooting is no longer necessary and serves no purpose. Don't bother, you're wrong.)
If the "industry" is "Verizon Wireless" then yes, locked phones are the norm.
The rest of the wireless service providers around the world and in the US provide unlocked phones
and are required to unlock a phone once a service contract is complete.
Verizon has ZERO interest in preventing phone theft. They could care less. This is just a protectionist move to lock in customers.
E
Verizon is taking an extra step to protect its phones.
A) They are not Verizon's phones. They are phones that Verizon customers own. Verizon owns the network not the phones.
B) They aren't protecting anything except their bottom line.
I recently upraded an iPhone, but I did it at an Apple Store instead of through VZW.
The Apple sales guy asked me if I wanted an unlocked SIM.
I'm guessing that third party vendors for Android phones would do the same.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Another reason to buy standard, uncrippled, unlocked phones separately from any airtime contract.
Buy them on credit if you must. My airtime provider doesn't care much as to what handset I have, so long as my SIM will fit, and it will work on the frequency ranges and technical standards that their network uses.
Insurance against a phone going missing in transit from the seller to the customer should not inconvenience the customer in any way, other than possibly acknowledging safe receipt of goods. If Verizon is worried about this, they should offer free unlocking immediately after their customer acknowledges safe receipt.
I think the locking part is more for IMEI blacklisting. The network has the ability to block known stolen phones via an IMEI blacklisting. But each carrier has their own blacklist (there is some sharing - but not international AFAIK). So at the moment - a thief can just take the phone to another network (especially out of country), and just use it.
Having the phone locked to the network for the first few months, means if a thief gets their hands prior to activation, then it's a brick.
If the sim lock is auto removed after 3-6 months then I see this as a GOOD change overall, as the incentive to steal phones is reduced.
If it's "in line with the rest of the industry", it'll be within a year. Another U.S. carrier unlocks after 90 days on a postpaid plan or one year on a prepaid plan (source).
Verizon is locking up phones and applying 200% markup to combat pedophilia. Are you against this? If so, why do you hate children?
I actually read the article. As part of the sales agreement for the 700MHZ spectrum purchase they agreed to sell their devices unlocked. I guess that agreement had a sunset or they are just choosing to ignore it now.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
I bought a Verizon prepaid phone last year and it had a sticker that said it was locked to Verizon for a year "to justify the low subsidized cost of the phone" or something like that. Is this expanding from prepaid phones to all of their phones, or was this already true for all of their phones?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
They are not Verizon's phones. They are phones that Verizon customers own.
Before the customer buys a phone, it is Verizon's phone.
After the customer buys a phone, it is a phone that a Verizon customer owns.
Locking a phone while it still belongs to Verizon helps to deter thieves from stealing a phone before a customer has a chance to buy it. This way Verizon can put the savings on its theft insurance policy into improving its network.
There must be no thieves in Belgium as it is forbidden, by law, to block phones. I change operator about every 1 to 2 years. I buy phones in the mean time when it pleases me.
I have the same cell phonenumber since 10 to 15 years. Changing operator is as easy as going into the store, signing up for a new pre-paid card and put it in. A few hours later I get the SMS that the transfer has been done. They even ask how much there is on the old provider, as you will lose that amount. If it is a lot, they advice to do it later, when it is less and not to loose the amount on the competitors sim. Not that much with a prepaid, but if you have a contract and end it too soon, you might pay a LOT.
And all this with unloocked phones.
There are contracts where it is in comination with a phone, but even then I could take the phone and use that with another provider, while I use an old phone with the new contract. So say I want to use an Android and my SO wants to use an iPhone. I can sign up for an iPhone contract, use it with the android and use the Android contract (with the same or a different provider) with the iPhone.
Oh, and no roaming costs in Europe. I hope they are working about no extra costs for calling international inside Europe. There are countries that have cheaper contracts.
And all that because there are not any thieves in Belgium. Well, that must be it, otherwise Verizon would be lying and how can a company be lying to their customers. That would be bad for business, right? RIGHT?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Verizon promised, when they purchase the 700Mhz spectrum in 2007, not to do this for any device which uses the 700Mhz spectrum.
ALL their phones use this spectrum.
But it's going to take a class action lawsuit to get them to agree to their own rules, because there is no way Ajit is going to take them to task for violating their agreement.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Here in Canada as of last November you cannot sell any phone locked...its the law.
Don't worry, Verizon has an "inside man" at the FCC to make sure there will be no consequences to violating the agreement. So much for "draining the swamp".
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
News at 11.
When a would-be thief sees the giant flashing "Powered by Verizon" sign floating over my phone, they'll know not to steal from me and to look for a giant "Brought to you by AT&T" banner. Thieves put a lot of thought into deciding which phone to steal.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Everyone reads the headline, and maybe part of TFS, and proceeds to jump to the worst possible conclusion.
From TFA: For consumers, there's little immediate impact because the phone gets unlocked immediately through a software update.
Also from TFA: Even after the change, Verizon will continue to unlock the phone [upon customer request] regardless of whether it's paid off or not. The company will also still accept unlocked phones from other carriers.
But don't let any of that get in the way of your impotent ramps, guys. You can always switch to that other provider that doesn't lock phones to their service. Let's see, who is that, again? From TFA one more time: AT&T requires you to pay off your phone and be active on your service for at least 60 days. Even then, there's a 14-day wait after you make your request. Sprint also requires that you have paid off your phone and wait 50 days, although the phone is automatically unlocked. T-Mobile has the same paid device requirement and a 40-day wait period, but will offer to temporarily unlock the device sooner for travel.
Probably the second. After all, the FCC Chairman is a Verizon hand-puppet... I mean "ex-Verizon lobbyist".
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's now illegal to sell a locked cellphone. Funny how as Canada moves one way the US seems to be moving the other.
You can blame Verizon for plenty of shitty things, but CDMA2000 isn't one of them.
Verizon Wireless began its life outside the NY metro region (and probably WITHIN it) as "PrimeCo" -- a company that was "CDMA" from day one. At the time PrimeCo launched in the mid-90s, it had four real-world alternatives:
* Analog. Never a real alternative, but listed for comprehensiveness.
* 1G GSM. Nearly-irrelevant outside of Europe. Almost by definition, mid-90s 1G GSM mandated frequencies that would have been impossible to license in North America. Even IF a US carrier used "GSM" with "North American" frequencies, the likelihood that a non-North-American "GSM" phone would have been interoperable was approximately "none". Compatible dual-band phones eventually appeared, but were the overwhelming exception rather than the rule until well into the early 2000s.
* TDMA. In the US, used primarily by AT&T. Basically, AT&T skimmed off the low-level parts of 1G-GSM, lopped off the parts that were needed to permit interoperability with other networks, and tweaked the standard in ways that allowed them to exceed the 35km max tower-phone distance limit that was baked into GSM.
* IDEN. Was basically another semi-proprietary flavor of TDMA whose main selling point was its ability to handle point-to-point communications among employees all connected to the same tower without incurring airtime charges. Popular with businesses, but even in its heyday, nobody expected it to have a long-term future in the US.
Compared to CDMA, both 1G-GSM and TDMA were archaic & primitive. CDMA is SO advanced (compared to TDMA, which GSM and IDEN were both flavors of), it almost looks like pure black magic:
* Soft hand-offs -- switch from tower to tower without anybody noticing. With GSM & TDMA, you heard a distinct click as you were handed off.
* Few hard constraints about tower placement and spectrum allocation. With GSM & TDMA, tower location & spectrum allocation has to be carefully planned, and reconfiguring later is a Very Big Deal. With CDMA, you can literally solve congestion problems by semi-randomly throwing new towers into a congested area & the network will literally "fix itself" (that's not to say good planning is irrelevant... good planning gets better and more cost-effective results... but with GSM/TDMA, it's absolutely 100% mandatory and non-negotiably REQUIRED).
* More efficient spectrum reuse. Simply put, you can transmit more total bits among all active users over the span of a second using a finite chunk of spectrum using CDMA than TDMA/GSM/IDEN.
The bigger clusterfuck in the US happened due to spectrum chaos and Qualcomm's certification policies. In theory, almost any top-shelf Android device sold since ~2013 is technically capable of doing 3G GSM and CDMA2000-EVDO on any network in America... except they aren't. Sprint's network won't allow customers to "natively" use any phone not literally sold by Sprint (eg, Sprint will allow one of the few remaining Canadian Telus CDMA2000 phones to roam on Sprint, but if the owner moves to the US, Sprint won't allow them to sign up for service using the phone that roamed perfectly well on the same network). Likewise, Verizon will grudgingly allow you to use an unlocked CDMA2000 phone on their network... but they won't lift a finger to give you the SLIGHTEST bit of help, and a non-Verizon CDMA2000 phone will NEVER be able to use EVDO on Verizon due to the way they implemented authentication (only CDMA2000-1xRTT, which is about 150kbps). An unlocked AT&T phone might be WILLING to do 3.5G HSPA on T-Mobile with a T-mobile SIM card, but only on frequencies used (or formerly used) by AT&T. An unlocked T-Mobile[US] phone might be willing and able to do 3.5G HSPA on AT&T with an AT&T SIM card, but nevertheless be unable to do LTE at all REGARDLESS of frequency due to Qualcomm's licensing policies.
Qualcomm's licensing policies deserve special note. Basically, Qualcomm licenses radio modem firmware to CARRI