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Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

arstechnica.com

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Re: Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

#101

Post by mullingitover »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #21
mullingitover wrote: post #18

Buy your own phone like everyone’s saying, but also use an MVNO instead of setting money on fire paying the major carriers. The better MVNOs even have multiple carriers and allow you to switch at any time.

TracFone / Straight Talk was my MVNO of choice, then Verizon bought them. >sigh (I wonder if this unlocking policy will retroactively apply to the locked Striaght Talk phone I bought back in October.)

Same. I switched to US Mobile, which is cheaper than Tracfone, has all three carriers, and thanks to eSIM they allow you to switch carriers any time you want.

Re: Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

#103

Post by bandrami »

danaris wrote: post #98
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent has risen about the same as wages over the last 40 years. So a bit higher than inflation but not so much that it’s less affordable.

Are those figures mean wages? Or median wages? Because the difference between those is a vast gulf.

Median. BLS barely tracks mean wages at all because it's extremely hard to do.

Re: Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

#104

Post by hermanzegerman »

rjh29 wrote: post #94
moi2388 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country you do not. No idea how they do it, but the plan and buying the phone separate (iPhone 16 pro Max) phone costs about 300 more than the phone and plan combined.

That implies you are paying too much for phones then, since the mobile providers can apparently get them significantly cheaper. They may also be selling your data and pre-installing apps, but every country does that.

I think it's a way for Phone OEMs to push their phones into the market as a marketing measure/to gain market shares without destroying their retail price because it never happens to very popular phones like the iPhone

Re: Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

#106

Post by JCattheATM »

userbinator wrote: post #53
Nextgrid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically phone locking was done at the modem level via an NCK code - if a phone is supplied by a carrier the modem will come pre-locked and will only be unlocked upon entry of an NCK code which the carrier has the secret key to generate (hash(secret+imei)). With this system if the phone is not locked to begin with I am not aware of any way to toggle this mechanism remotely. With smartphones however, the game has…

I am not sure what the Android situation is in comparison. If you have root, you can easily unlock the modem and keep it unlocked.

If you don't have the key, how? I browsed XDA forums a lot in the past to try and ulock and old phone, and there didn't seem to be any way. All of the guides ended up being nonsense.

Someone above said you need the NCK code which is generated from a secret only the carrier has - how does having root get around this?

Re: Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

#107

Post by JCattheATM »

mullingitover wrote: post #18

Buy your own phone like everyone’s saying, but also use an MVNO instead of setting money on fire paying the major carriers. The better MVNOs even have multiple carriers and allow you to switch at any time.

Honestly everyone should just use T-Mobile Connect. They make it very hard to find on their site, but it's their true prepaid service, cheapest plan is 5GB of data and unlimited calls/texts, and it won't a lesser priority like MVNOs are.

The fact that people pay over $100/month for a phone bill is truly a uniquely mind-boggling American thing.

Re: Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

#108

Post by JCattheATM »

hallman76 wrote: post #33
jdelman wrote: post #19

I’m switching to T-Mobile.

Go a step further and switch to Mint, T-mobile's pay-as-you-go subsidiary. I'm paying $180/year for a single line. I've been on mint for ~3 years now. On Mint your traffic is routed with lower priority than T-Mobile's main customers. In practice, I have only experienced this at busy airports and an MLB game - where basically service dropped to near zero. This is in the Boston area. Obviously not ideal if you're in th…

> Go a step further and switch to Mint, T-mobile's pay-as-you-go subsidiary. I'm paying $180/year for a single line. I've been on mint for ~3 years now.

> On Mint your traffic is routed with lower priority than T-Mobile's main customers.

Much better to just use T-Mobile connect. Same pricing without the lower priority. I pay $15/month for my line which works out the same to $180/year.

Re: Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

#110

Post by miki123211 »

toast0 wrote: post #88
0xC0ncord wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an option that's available all the time? Back when the Nexus 5 was still new, I tried doing exactly this and took one I just bought to my local Verizon outlet to have it activated on their network. The tech there told me that while the phone DID have the hardware needed to be compatible on Verizon's network, he was "not allowed" to activate it for me unless I bought it directly through them. I've since switch…

Verizon around the Nexus 5 still had a lot of CDMA and you needed to have a phone activated. Now that networks are pretty much LTE and 5G only, if your phone takes a SIM, take the SIM out of the old phone and put it in the new phone. Some carriers still play games with allowlists for VoLTE though. But you might have better luck (and better pricing) with a MVNO or the prepaid side of your preferred carrier.

Allowlists for VoLTE are a perfectly reasonable (if extremely unfortunate) safety measure.

Because of the special handling that emergency calls must get in cellular networks, many older phones will use circuit-switched fallback (AKA 3g or 2G) for those calls, even if they are otherwise VoLTE capable.

This was pretty much fine back in the day, as 2g and 3g networks were just as (if not more) widespread as VoLTE, but those networks are now being shut down. If you have one of these phones and an LTE-only carrier allows it onto their network, you will be able to make any normal call, but emergency calls will not work.

To add insult to injury, there's no way for the carrier to tell whether any specific phone does emergency calls over VoLTE or not, especially if they don't have a contract with that vendor. Some phones may only do it in certain configurations, E.G. when branded for that specific carrier and configured with their preferred modem settings.

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