On 2025-09-07 22:40, James Knott via Talk wrote:
Life for unlocked phones became much easier when everybody moved to GSM now LTE. I have never had a locked phone and I've been buying them for 30 years. The way to avoid locked phones was to buy them separate from a contract. I don't think locking was even possible with the 1G analog
On 9/7/25 22:28, Alvin Starr via Talk wrote: phones. In fact, they could be switched between the A (Rogers) and B (Bell in this area) carriers. The reason for locking was so that people wouldn't buy a "cheap" phone on contract and then try to take it with them to another carrier, before they finished paying for it. Those contracts were an expensive way to buy a phone and fortunately those days are long gone.
Walk into Costco or BestBuy or your local mall. there are lots of people selling phones with and without plans. The carriers still appear to want to give you a discount on a phone if you buy it with a plan. Part of their pitch is that is looks easier to shell out hundreds of dollars a month for a plan instead of lashing out $1000 or more for a phone today. Its like automobile financing. Way back in the mists of time........ The original analog phones may have been portable between carriers and I don't remember the deal when I got my first brick phone. But at some point Rogers moved to GSM and Bell went with CDMA so that if you had a Bell phone you could not use it on a GSM based carrier. The reason I got the CDMA phone was because of the data features of CDMA but strangely those features were turned off in the Bell provided phone. Much to my displeasure. I eventually bought a CDMA PCMCIA card for my laptop. -- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || home: (905)513-7688 alvin@netvel.net ||