AT&T tries to defend why it shouldn't let you unlock your phone sooner

I don’t play this game. I buy my own unlocked phone and find prepaid cell service at a fraction of the cost.

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??

Just make carrier locking illegal and have customers pay the actual price, now it's just hidden costs to the consumer.

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 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"

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?

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.

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…

It'll lead to higher prices meaning they'll charge more lol

Capitalist companies can be awfully communist when it comes to our cellphone.

Meanwhile Australia is going to fore carriers to disconnect customers with devices that are not guaranteed to support emergency calling over volte. As there are still unsolved problems with detecting that, the providers fall back to only allowing devices they provided themselves.

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.