Starting February 11, 2015, All Four Major US Carriers Will Let You SIM Unlock

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radeon962

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http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/0...u-sim-unlock-your-phone-heres-the-fine-print/


As of February 11th, the CTIA (basically, the wireless industry's special interest group) is laying out a set of phone unlocking (that is, SIM/network unlocking) principles that AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular will abide by in the wake of the congressional un-banning of phone unlocking.

Rest of the article is at the link
 
I guess cool beans if your carrier locks your phone. Verizon hasn't sim locked phones for a while now (4g phones).
 
Shiny, I can take my Sprint G2 (LS980) elsewhere when the contract is done. (should I even care to)
 
The weird thing is, in the U.S. the Nazi carriers still control it.

Ok, let's say you have ATT SIM unlock your phone, well you can't take that newly unlocked phone to Verizon, because they run different radio technology, CDMA vs GSM. And I think same would be unlocking your T-Mobile phone, and then bringing it to Sprint, it won't work, the T-Mo phone won't work on Sprint, even after it's unlocked, due to the different radios.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here ? But I don't think SIM unlocking is a major deal here in the U.S. because the way the carriers set their stuff up years ago.

Only the new Nexus 6 is the only smartphone with all the radios inside to work on all 4 carriers. I suppose in the future more phones will be like that, but right now, it's a very limited selection of smartphones.
 
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munkle said:
I guess cool beans if your carrier locks your phone. Verizon hasn't sim locked phones for a while now (4g phones).
Click to expand...

*Verizon cannot sim lock phones (while using band 13 LTE by FCC rules ). They're not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_2008_wireless_spectrum_auction#Google_involvement

Zorachus said:
The weird thing is, in the U.S. the Nazi carriers still control it.

Ok, let's say you have ATT SIM unlock your phone, well you can't take that newly unlocked phone to Verizon, because they run different radio technology, CDMA vs GSM. And I think same would be unlocking your T-Mobile phone, and then bringing it to Sprint, it won't work, the T-Mo phone won't work on Sprint, even after it's unlocked, due to the different radios.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here ? But I don't think SIM unlocking is a major deal here in the U.S. because the way the carriers set their stuff up years ago.
Click to expand...
GSM phones generally don't have CDMA radios and won't work on Verizon/Sprint's CDMA voice. They might still be able to connect to LTE (if bands are supported on phone) and might be able to use VoLTE. Verizon does not block LTE devices from connecting on their network, Sprint still does whitelist on network level

In the future with full LTE coverage + VoLTE, and LTE bands intercompatibility, might be less of an issue. Right now, only way to get this is to buy a Nexus 6 (supported across all 4 carriers), or maybe any iPhone 6/6+ (t-mobile/at&t/? versions have hidden CDMA compatibility... can be used on att/tmobile/verizon, but sprint might still block it) or an unlocked Sprint iPhone 6/6+ (should work across all 4 once unlocked)
 
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It makes a big difference if you sell your old phones. A SIM unlocked phone will.sell faster and for a premium over a locked phone.
 
This really isn't a big deal, the only major carrier effected is Sprint. The same policies will still apply for any other carier
 
Zorachus said:
The weird thing is, in the U.S. the Nazi carriers still control it.

Ok, let's say you have ATT SIM unlock your phone, well you can't take that newly unlocked phone to Verizon, because they run different radio technology, CDMA vs GSM. And I think same would be unlocking your T-Mobile phone, and then bringing it to Sprint, it won't work, the T-Mo phone won't work on Sprint, even after it's unlocked, due to the different radios.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here ? But I don't think SIM unlocking is a major deal here in the U.S. because the way the carriers set their stuff up years ago.

Only the new Nexus 6 is the only smartphone with all the radios inside to work on all 4 carriers. I suppose in the future more phones will be like that, but right now, it's a very limited selection of smartphones.
Click to expand...

Most cdma smart phones you can take to a gsm carrier if they are unlocked as they still have the gsm radios, the opposite isn't true like stated above. I've used my verizon note 2, droid maxx, and note 4 all on tmobile before. The iffy part is if the phone supports the same lte bands, you'll probably get 3g but 4g is sketchy depending on the phone.
 
Ozymandias said:
Verizon, Sprint, and US Cellular whitelist IMEIs. If your unlocked phone isn't on the whitelist and you're using a new SIM, it's not getting activated.
Click to expand...

This isn't that big of a deal because sprint and verizon are cdma, so unless you originally bought a phone for their network it wouldn't even work as a phone if you could activate it. The only cdma phones I know of (maybe there are more, I haven't heard of any) that are cross compatible between sprint and verizon would be certain iphone models originally sold for cdma networks and nexus 6.

You wouldn't be able to use an att/tmobile phone on verizon even if they would activate it since it doesn't support cdma.

The only case this is a problem is a new sim and you have no previous verizon smartphone as well, you can pop in an old sim just fine, you can activate the new sim with an old phone just fine. Verizon will also add the device to its system if it is an officially Verizon compatible device, I had to call verizon because they don't have developer edition note 4's in their database to get it activated, they took my imei and a day later called me back and said the imei is in their system and I can activate the phone. How sprint handles sim activations I have no idea, they suck and i would never use them.
 
None of this matters to the 3rd party market. Tmobile, for instance, won't unlock a phone unless it can be proven you have an account with them and that the phone has been used for a while.
 
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