I don’t play this game. I buy my own unlocked phone and find prepaid cell service at a fraction of the cost.
This is the way
One of the three carriers in Canada is about to do away with prepaid entirely in December. That said, I have a pretty affordable monthly plan and I buy my phones outright.
Is it not normal that you can use any phone with any abonnement?
Why is prepaid service cheaper? I never understood why plans cost more. You would thing it would be the opposite.
Some reasons:
- prioritized traffic - if towers are congested, carrier customers get priority over prepaid customers
- name brand recognition - most have heard of Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T, few have heard of Tell, Ting, or RedPocket
- financing - you can get “free” upgrades from bigger carriers, whereas I pay cash w/ my prepaid service
- features - most big carriers support roaming (sometimes international roaming), whereas those tend to be ala carte w/ prepaid
In short, you get a bit more hassle w/ prepaid, but you get a lot of savings. I pay <$10/month for my service (1GB data, unlimited text, 300 minutes call), and I could get unlimited everything for $25-30 (depending on prepaid carrier). I bought my phone for <$400, whereas cost is less of a concern for big carriers since they often offer financing issues. I hate monthly payments, so I prefer to buy devices in cash and keep my monthly service payments low.
Plus the bills are paid up front. No collections department, or write-offs. Plus you get to earn interest if the customer pre pays multiple months or a year in advance.
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Because prepaid customers get lower priority on the tower. If I’m in even a moderately crowded area, my connection speeds go to shit and nothing loads.
Basically, AT&T argues against it saying it’ll force them to innovate and be competitive with other services.
Won’t anyone think of the poor telecom shareholders??
https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/contact/phone/q19.htm
Canada:
First, locked phones are a thing of the past. Effective December 1, 2017, service providers will have to offer unlocked devices to their customers.
What are the benefits of having an unlocked device?
An unlocked device can be used on other networks, which means that you will be able to switch providers and keep the same phone. That means more flexibility for you, the consumer.
I want to reiterate this. Even second hand phones. Find the carrier and call them. They legally have to oblige.
I remember trying to do this when this first became law. Bell told me no anyways.
Same! Except it was Koodo. Told me that they were “exempt” from the ruling.
I helped someone with a second hand phone last year and I think it was Bell.
Just make carrier locking illegal and have customers pay the actual price, now it’s just hidden costs to the consumer.
It isn’t been a hidden cost for a while. Phone companies sell the phones at full price, but consumers want the 2 year 0% APR financing.
If consumers bought the phones from a third party, there’d be absolutely no reason to lock the phone to a carrier. But when carriers also provide the financing, there’s an incentive to keep them on the service until the bill is paid. Screw that.
But who is going to provide the financing otherwise?
PayPal credit is an option. No interest if you pay it off in 6 months.
There are tons of buy now, pay later services, and they make money through revenue sharing w/ the retailer, as well as when people fail to pay back the loan on time.
But ideally, this would just put downward pressure on phone prices as people look to buy phones w/ cash instead of going into debt.
Just like Smart TV’s.
Honestly any moderately expensive item can be purchased through installments. Go to any electronics store and they’ll have offers like that, and they use different services to provide that financing.
It’s a non-issue, carriers don’t need to be a party to that at all. I can literally go to BestBuy or Apple and get 0% financing on a new phone and take it to any carrier I want.
You know what you’re talking about. It’s nice to see that.
But if carriers didn’t have phones for sale everyone would be mad about it. They might have even been mad in the beginning, so the carriers started selling phones too.
You’re going off of phone contracts that haven’t been around for a decade. The cost of the phone up front, and has been for a long time.
Then carrier locking should just be plain illegal.
They lock it so you’ll pay for the phone. That’s the only reason.
Should requiring people to pay for things be illegal?Frankly you’re being ignorant, and expect to somehow get a thousand dollar device for free. That’s not how the world works.
Wha? The guy I responded to said the customers now pay full price up front. If a device is bought it should be unlocked.
Additionally giving away a phone for a determined time contract means that the company is technically giving you a loan and it should be on your credit record, require the company to do a proper credit check and be allowed to give out loans.
Bottom line, it’s predatory and should not be allowed. Noone is advocating giving 1000 dollar phones for free… it was a strawman you stuck me with… but I don’t want it.
Wha? The guy I responded to said the customers now pay full price up front.
No. I never said that. I said the cost of the phone is upfront. There are no 2 year contracts anymore, and haven’t been for at least a decade. You see the full price of the phone, and decide how much a month you want to spend to pay it off.
If a device is bought it should be unlocked.
I agree with you. And that’s how it works. The question is how long after paying off the phone should it be locked.
Additionally giving away a phone for a determined time contract …
Again, they haven’t offered contracts like that in ten years. But yes you do need to pass a credit check to have a phone financed.
Bottom line, it’s predatory and should not be allowed.
What exactly should not be allowed?
OK so you buy the phone on a payment plan… and credit check. Then once it’s paid off it should be unlocked.
Correct, you’ve got it. That’s how it’s worked for ten+ years.
You can continue paying at&t for the phone after moving to a different carrier.
How do you think people will steal phones like this?
When did that become possible?
Last I knew is when you cancel your account (which is what moving to another carrier is) they billed you for the remaining balance of the phone.No I mean thats what’s proposed. I’m saying leaving the companies service has nothing to do with a loan they gave you. They are separate things. Its possible they would stop with no interest but I believe they can still make money without interest in some cases.
Ah gotcha. Yeah that’d be cool. I hope it works out. More options is always better.
Your probably right about the interest, or else why would they agree to it.
I accidentally broke my Sony after drowning it a little too hard. I remember going into a AT&T store at a mall in the us and having this literal conversation.
“Do you have the Pixel 7 Pro?”
“Yes! We do.”
“Does it come carrier unlocked?”
“No…”
“Thanks for your time”
Like when you buy the thing sooner? Cuz we would remove all the bloatware they add. They used to do that to computers and we just stopped buying those shit things and building our own.
Shit man. I used to work at a Circuit City at the height of bloated shitty Celeron PCs.
We would be forced to sell a “system optimization” on each PC we sold. It was just a script that uninstalled a few of the bloatware items and tweaked the animation speed to make the customer think we did something incredible.
I fucking hated that job!
That’s just straight up a scam
Did you not see they said circuit city? Probably felt it was redundant to call it a scam.
I made a lot of money when I had a shop reloading machines. After a clean install without all the crap the manufactures and some of the stores installed the customer was happy with the speed increase.
Reads like a scam. Maybe our time is not as full of scams as compared to the past.
After all, memories get distorted. As kids and teens we’d have parents look out for us and give good advice, helping us avoid some of the worse parts.
Out of curiosity, I would imagine that if someone goes the carrier-financing route, they’d still be on the hook for the cost of the phone even if they jumped to a different carrier? I don’t want to sound like I’m in support of at&t, but it doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable to keep a customer in place while they still have a balance on the hardware, or is there something else I’m missing?
Yeah. I always saw it as a trade-off. “Here’s a cheaper or zero interest loan for a phone. You get this in exchange for paying us a cell phone bill for the next year or two.”
What pusses me off is that none of the big three give any discount if you have your own phone. If the guy next to me gets $600 off his cell phone purchase and pays $80/month, how come I still pay $80/month with my own device?
Wow, I pay £10 a month for unlimited calls/text and 45GB data. Not even on contract, it’s a monthly rolling bill, I can cancel at any time. The reason for this, there’s pretty good competition between carriers/NVMOs in the UK at the moment, driving prices down.
Not sure what carrier you’re on, but I pay $35/mo per line with Verizon and have 2 SIM cards for my phone. Granted we have a family plan, and my wife pays $60/mo cause she wants her latest iPhone, but it usually works out cheaper to buy a phone online outright a year or two after release and then I’m not paying the recurring finance charges.
Thanks. I just threw out $80 as an example, but I get mine pretty cheap through t mobile. Got 3 lines and their gateway internet for like $110.
I agree with what you’re saying. They got the phone from Carrier A with the expectation the phone plan went with it. Once the phone is paid off, they can take the phone to Carrier B. Since they phone is basically bought on an interest free loan, the interest is recouped by the plan, and the collateral for not paying is a loss of the phone plan and use of the phone. To leave the plan, payoff the phone.
That does require that, the moment the phone is paid off, it should be automatically unlocked. There shouldn’t have to be a request or additional waiting. And the customer should be notified that it’s unlocked along with an explanation that they can now use the phone with any other provider.
Automatic unlocking sounds like a pipe dream given the American business landscape, but there shouldn’t be any barriers to unlocking, even if the customer has to request it. People are likely stuck in the mindset of yesteryear where phones weren’t transferrable between carriers (especially with band compatibility of GSM vs CDMA), and I’d wager that many people don’t even realize it’s possible these days. I can’t say I blame carriers for wanting to maintain the illusion, and I don’t necessarily think they should be forced to advertise it, but the option should be plain and simple for those who want to exercise the right.
They automatically unlock it once it’s paid off. They have a disclaimer that it needs to stay on the network for 60 days after it’s paid off, but I think that’s a CYA because mine was unlocked within a day of the last payment.
I just checked and I have 6 unlocked phones on my account and never requested any of them.
You’re right. You still have to pay the remaining balance of the phone when you cancel early.
This literally happened to me recently. Was going to Germany for 2 weeks and wanted to use a cheap eSIM for data only. I asked them if they could unlock my phone so I could do this, and they said no since it’s not paid off. I still have a new months left to pay it off, and didn’t wanna drop $250 to do that so I just had to pay the international data plan. $12(maybe $10? Can’t remember) a day, 10 day maximum charge per cycle so I’ll pay $120 for mine and $60 for my partners. Instead of the $11 30gb data plan I wanted. I’m never buying a phone from a carrier again, I will always just buy it outright from now on. It was a stupid situation.
Also the data roaming sucked, each time we moved from one provider network to another we had to restart our phones as the data didn’t wanna work…
A burner phone with a hotspot would have been cheaper.
This is the way. Go buy a cheap phone when you get there and screw AT&FEE
Capitalist companies can be awfully communist when it comes to our cellphone.
That’s giving them too much credit. I think they want it to be theirs.
It’ll lead to higher prices meaning they’ll charge more lol
When I bought my current phone they sent me one that was locked. I called at&t to try and get it resolved and they told me to pound sand because I’m not a customer. Huge ordeal that could have been solved in 2 minutes.
