Random Chit Chat

The White House is in favor of letting you legally unlock your cellphone or other mobile device without your carriers' approval, and is considering a range of actions to achieve that end including a potential push for Congressional action, the administration announced Monday.

:eek: :eek:

I find it rather shocking that the government would get involved in this.

http://mashable.com/2013/03/04/white-house-unlocking/

I heard about that.
 
The White House is in favor of letting you legally unlock your cellphone or other mobile device without your carriers' approval, and is considering a range of actions to achieve that end including a potential push for Congressional action, the administration announced Monday.

:eek: :eek:

I find it rather shocking that the government would get involved in this.

http://mashable.com/2013/03/04/white-house-unlocking/

I've never believed in being tied to one service provider. Whether it's internet, cable tv, or cell phones. It stifles competition. Say you have a phone you bought from brand A. They offered a phone that has most of the features you were looking for at the time, ie:apps. You got reasonable bandwidth usage, text, and free LD calling. You've been a good customer for the life of your contract and you're looking at renewing.

Now to get those same goodies the cost has gone up while the provided services have been reduced. So, you're looking at that state of the art phone you pawned your car to get in your hand and you're thinking, "F that. Let's scope out brand B here and see what they have."

Brand B, an up and coming company, is genuinely happy to see you. Their service package is fully customizable and is very reasonably priced. You get it in writing for X amount of time with a waiver on breaking the contract fee if you want to bail out. Great deal huh?

Not so fast there hotrod. Here's the shot to the cajones you don't deserve.
That state of the art phone is locked in to the service of brand A. Through some wheeling and dealing with the phone maker, brand A has exclusive rights to that make and model. You're screwed...

To get brand B's service you're going to have to
A: Buy a new phone.
B: Illegally unlock the phone and hope brand B will accept it.
C: Go back to brand A and take the higher cost, lower quality service.

With legal unlocking, you can go to any service provider who's network supports your phone. The big boys fear that. They want to stick their hands in your pockets and stay there. By allowing phone customers the option of being able to change providers competition will get fierce. That will be the time to strike on getting the phone you want with the service provider you want. Otherwise you are going to be at the mercy of the big boys of the cell phone service providers.

When brand A sees their customers leaving them by the train loads, maybe they'll wake up and start acting right.
Competition is good for the economy besides being good for the customer base. Company's make a profit. Consumers get what they want. And everybody's happy.
But that's not how things are now. Speak up and let the fat cats know you ain't gonna take the crap any more. Power to the people!!!
 
If phone unlocking is made legal, the carriers will just make phone manufacturers only support their specific frequencies, and not the ones of competitors. AT&T used to do this all the time. LTE seems to be on the same bands for all the US carriers except sprint, but the earlier systems are all over the place. Having an LTE only phone would be pretty terrible given how little coverage it has.
 
If phone unlocking is made legal, the carriers will just make phone manufacturers only support their specific frequencies, and not the ones of competitors. AT&T used to do this all the time. LTE seems to be on the same bands for all the US carriers except sprint, but the earlier systems are all over the place. Having an LTE only phone would be pretty terrible given how little coverage it has.

I wonder whether this would be an illegal route for emergency call reasons. In the UK at least, you can place a 999 call on any network free of charge, which makes sense. Arbitrarily cut this down and you could sensibly claim companies are forfeiting emergency service coverage, which may not be currently illegal but I'd imagine (hope) would be a bigger incentive to ban this workaround too.

Moreover, I'd hope the law would come in the form of it being illegal for service providers to lock phones, rather than it being legal for us to unlock them (or both of course.) If they only support specific frequencies, this is still a prime example of locking, just on a lower level (locking at the physical hardware rather than the software / driver layer.)
 
Interesting thoughts there berry120. While your phone can scan all of the 800 band phone channels locking it to just a handful of channels would be troublesome to say the least.
Say you buy a phone in Atlanta that is lock to channel cluster A. You go to a small town like where I am in hicksville USA. Channel cluster A is not implemented here so your phone is useless. There was actually a small phone company that did just that. Your phone only worked in a tiny service footprint. They went the way of the dodo thank goodness. I had one of those suckers and damn near lost the job I had at the time cause my boss couldn't get a hold of me.
I would venture that locking a phone to a set cluster of freqs would involve buying the rights to that cluster from the government office in charge. That would be the FCC here in the colonies. If companies did manage to pull that off the exclusivity of it all would be outrageously high in cost due to having to reprogram ALL cell service equipment.
But knowing those dorks at AT$T they'd do it just to keep other companies from being able to use those channels. I'd put a rider on the contract from the FCC saying you have use them in X amount of time or they go back up for grabs.
Hopefully that idea stays cost prohibitive even for the big boys.
 
Back
Top Bottom