About bloody time too. The carriers should never have been allowed to lock the phones in the first place!
They locked them becaused they amortized the cost of the phone over period of years, did you really think you were getting that phone for free or at discount.
Notice BT is one of last carrier still licking phone that is government backed carrier. BY does not want people just walking away.
Well no, natuarlly I knew that they factored in the cost of the phone. Why else would I spend £30 a month rather than £10 a month!
I don't think anyone was foolish enough to ever think that they were getting a "free" phone.
They made their money by having me in a contract, if I failed to pay they could seek legal recourse. The locking of the phone was only ever designed to make it difficult for me to leave them and should not have been a barrier they could put in place.
About bloody time too. The carriers should never have been allowed to lock the phones in the first place!
They locked them becaused they amortized the cost of the phone over period of years, did you really think you were getting that phone for free or at discount.
They don’t need to lock the hardware for that, the price is included in the monthly payments of the contract. Even If you switch carriers you’re still liable for the contract.
Early on, when almost all smart phones were financed by the carrier the cost of the phone was buried in the price of the cell service rather than broken out. There was no explicit recognition that the user was paying for the phone in installments. So, locking the phone was a way the carrier could protect itself from a customer switching carriers by physically locking the phone to their net work and only their network.
That makes no difference, if the customer used the phone on a different network, they would still be liable for the contract; the law protected the carrier, phone locking did not. Locking the phone was purely a way of keeping the customer on after the contract expired.
That would make sense -- Except, the contract was for the cell service not the phone. So locking was the only way the carrier could protect itself.
There was another aspect to this locking that was even more insidious: it was when the modem in the phone would only work on certain networks. While the technophiles often understood it, most average users did not and, even after their phone was "unlocked", it was still locked to the networks of certain carriers because its modem would only work on those networks -- and there was nothing anybody could do to change that. A Verizon phone would never, ever work on an AT&T network and vice-versa.
Average, nontechnical users generally had no idea that that was happening.
And, with 5G and its customizability by the carriers it has the potential for happening again. I hope that it doesn't.
Are you referring to the CDMA vs GSM days? I wouldn't lump that into the non-technical carrier locking issue being discussed because the non-technical locking can be easily removed. If you had a CDMA phone it could never be "unlocked" to work on a GSM network because the device had different radios installed. I seem to recall that Apple made it very clear that you were buying a carrier specific phone when this was the case, but I suppose some buyers were still unaware and who knows what the sales people communicated to buyers at the time of purchase.
The locking thing was probably a "scheme" pushed on to Apple by AT&T when AT&T was the only carrier available for iPhone and they demanded a way to preserve exclusivity. Who knows, perhaps AT&T provided Apple with some sort of quality of service (QoS) guarantee if iPhones were locked into to AT&T networks? The iPhone put a lot more connectivity demands on networks back then compared to most any other phone of the day. Yeah, it was a stupid idea in retrospect but Apple probably felt that they needed a special relationship with AT&T to get iPhone launched in a big way. The iPhone's success wasn't a sure thing at the time. Once the iPhone sales exploded and more carriers were brought into the mix the locking thing was probably an artifact of a standard operating procedure and the other carriers wanted in on the same deal that AT&T received.
The only carrier locked phone I ever had was an iPhone 4s purchased through AT&T. As soon as it was paid off they removed the lock, with no fee and without prompting. This is a pretty good indicator that whatever reason originally existed for carriers locking phones faded away fairly quickly. Also, the carrier subsidy gimmicky has been toned down somewhat, especially with Apple providing straightforward payment plans for the devices that bypass the carriers entirely. Why any existing carrier would continue with the prehistoric practice of locking phones defies all logic. I hope the UK ban is stated as "Hey carriers, stop being stupid!"
I think few non-technical people were aware of the different networks and buying a "carrier specific phone" meant something very different to them. Certainly Apple never made it clear what the differences were.
And, from what I have seen AT&T unlocking your phone without even being asked was highly unusual. My experience was that the process was not made readily apparent and was intentionally convoluted. And, there are many reports of people who were unable to get the carrier to unlock their phone.
The whole thing was friendly to either competition or the consumer. Instead, it was a mess.
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That would make sense -- Except, the contract was for the cell service not the phone. So locking was the only way the carrier could protect itself.