The Federal Communications Commission is letting Verizon lock phones to its network for longer periods, eliminating a requirement to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network.
The change will make it harder for people to switch from Verizon to other carriers.
Until today’s waiver order, Verizon faced strict unlocking requirements that didn’t apply to other carriers. But that was by choice, as Verizon gained significant benefits in exchange for agreeing to unlocking requirements in 2008 when it purchased licenses to use 700 MHz spectrum, and again in 2021 when it agreed to merger conditions to obtain approval for its purchase of TracFone.
Businesses getting handouts. Consumers get shafted.
Yay freedom!
Revolution of all consumers needs to start now.
My latest phone I bought refurbished and unlocked, and I switched to an MVNO called Tello. Couldn’t be happier.
Tello is solid, assuming you don’t need support beyond ‘how do I make phone calls’ tier 1 support, and that you don’t regularly get connected to an oversubscribed tower.
I’ve had tello as my second line for years and it’s fine, $6. But I tried to move my folks to it, and the tower we connect to at home is so badly saturated, data literally stops working during the day. Tello uses tmo, and tmo gives MVNOs qci8 (lower is better, 6 is ‘priority’ data for tmo). It’s the only downside to tello (but any tmo mvno will have the same issue).
E: excluding a couple metro by tmo plans, and one specific fi plan
“Fuck Verizon and fuck I.C.E.” -Robby Roadsteamer
People in EU: WTF is phone locking?
It was all fun and banter but I’m starting to get a little bit sad for our American friends, looking at my 8.99€ monthly 186GB 5G (4G after that) phone bill, and my 29.99€ monthly 2.5Gb home connection (10Gb is +10€ but do I really need that? I’ll get it if my sharing network starts to get popular :-).
And yet another company who bought favors from their government
We only have upon request unlocking in Canada too.Edit: my bad, I guess I was thinking of when the law passed you had to call in for old phones.
That’s not true at all. Phones have to be sold unlocked and have been since 2017. Any devices sold before then can be unlocked for free upon request, but that is almost 9 years ago which essentially means that all phones in active use in Canada are unlocked.
Here’s a more recent ruling by the CRTC blasting Bell for violating the rule as they were locking and then auto-unlocking after 60 days, which was also found to be a violation:
My bad, I guess I was thinking of when the law passed you had to call in for old phones.
Thank you for the info and links.
Ofc that why I left Verizon since year ago. Verizon is sick company.
