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"Hey, I just bought a used iphone that is locked to t-mobile, which is normally fine, but I'm about to go overseas and need to use it with a local sim card, can you unlock it for me"
I've done this multiple times (spread out by years so not abusing anything).
Google Fi (originally Project Fi) was amazing when it first came out, but at some point they switched to contracted support with no ability to resolve issues (it's not even the support people's fault, as they literally don't have the power to do anything). For awhile Google people used to hang out in the Google Fi subreddit but they seem to have mostly moved on to other projects or companies. Besides locking phones l…
My two month old pixel had the microphone die suddenly. After battling for a week, they refused to send me anything but a refurbished phone. Then they didn't scan the return in when received and charged me the full, brand new price for the refurb. Another couple days of useless support tech I got my money back.
“blame is actually:
- Apple’s for blindly allowing this behavior,
- Best Buy’s for not advertising it,
- T-Mobile’s for allowing this through MNVO’s, and
- Google’s for not knowing that this happens and not allowing unlocks.”
For those who live outside the states but go to visit every once in awhile, what do you do for sim cards? I live in Japan and currently I switch to a google fi sim card when I visit, but it's far from ideal.
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Google lost it's way as a company long ago. They used to be the ones defining what it meant to be in a progressive workplace, eschewing the corporate workplace. Now they are that corporate workplace, getting passed up by all the startups. All their products are half-baked, where it's painfully obvious no thought was put in to making a product that was intended to last.
I met some amazing Google engineers - network and SRE peope - early in my career and idolised them for a long time. Recently I got to work with Google on the commercial side and I was shocked by the incompetence, apathy and fear. No idea what’s going on in engineering but rarely have I worked with commercial folks who were so under-qualified and disempowered.
5 years ago I used Google Fi and it was just awful. I bought a Nexus 5x on a Google Fi deal. Fi was super unreliable, customer service was dumpster fire garbage, and multiple hardware issues with the Nexus 5x and the sim card for whatever reason. There were even recalls and class action lawsuits with the 5x and the 6p that I missed out on. Not at all surprised that Google Fi is still terrible.
the 6p was a great phone though and at the time the ease of use with international travel was a real treat
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Try to buy a phone from best buy and not have them set it up for you. It's impossible, they will refuse to sell you the phone.
They charge extra if you don’t activate the phone at the store.
> I learned that Google Fi exclusively uses the T-Mobile network for iPhone customers, and activating a Google Fi SIM with an iPhone causes T-Mobile to lock the phone to the T-Mobile network (which is illegal, since the user hasn’t entered into any service agreement with T-Mobile). Wow, carriers can just remotely lock an unlocked phone? How does this even work? Is this some kind of command that the SIM card sends the…
Beyond Google Fi and T-Mobile, this story has made me suddenly much more apprehensive about picking up SIM cards from some local MVNO when traveling. What’s to stop a local operator from locking my phone and leaving an unpleasant surprise waiting when I get home? And now I also have to wonder: do eSIMs have the same vulnerability to bad-actor carriers? Is this a risk with any of the companies Airalo has partnered wit…
In Canada at least, we went through three stages. 1. Buy locked second-hand phone, send $20 to shady operator somewhere to get unlock code, unlock. 2. Buy locked second-hand phone, call up the carrier it is locked to and demand the unlock code, which (after the law changed) they had to legally give you free of charge[1], enter digits, unlock. 3. No more unlocked phones since carrier locking is now illegal.
Doesn't that mean that in Canada, reaching down and "re-locking" a phone is also illegal? And since we're generally a bit behind here compared to the USA, how can such a problem even exist any more?
Note[1]: My mom loves her landline phones and refuses to use a smartphone. So she has one of those cellular-to-phone-jack gateways. I procured a spare replacement via classified ads. It was locked. Called the carrier, got the digits. Entered them via DTMF keypad on an old fashioned phone. I could hardly believe this would work, but it did! The thing unlocked and henceforth worked with any SIM.
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> By you going directly to civil courts you are breaching their TOS which is a reason for termination That's a novel theory. So if I sue the power company because a cherry picker rear-ended my 1978 land yacht they can just shut me off in -20 winter weather because I sued them?
I didn’t say that. In your example, you are a consumer of a public service. In the Google case you are a user of a private service.