Wanting to unlock your 3g? Read this first...

Jarlawuk

Just been published in mobile news (mobile industry mag) that 3g are starting to glue sim cards to their low end payg handsets in order to combat boxbreakers (in short - people who buy phones in bulk and sell them abroad for profit). So if you are planning to take advantage of one of the cheap handset deals and want to pop your own sim card in, I suggest you check it when buying. Older stock is fine but pretty much all future stock will have it.

Amba_Gambla

cheers for that...

how will you tell though??? Will it say in the item description b4 you buy?

Jarlawuk

Retailer is supposed to tell you but more often than not the staff would most likely forget so best thing to do is check the phone yourself before you bought it.

*!*HIBS*!*

Yea but its not possible if you buy it online. However you do have the chance to return the product should you decide not to keep it, thanks to the distance selling regulation!

MUHAMID

i got Motorola c975 last week and it says 'This phone is permanently lock on 3 network'so i think thats true.

Woby_Tide

what a daft decision, just making more work for themselves by having to migrate phone numbers every time someone wants to upgrade or get a new phone with them but retain a number.

Jarlawuk

Woby_Tide wrote:

what a daft decision, just making more work for themselves by having to migrate phone numbers every time someone wants to upgrade or get a new phone with them but retain a number.

Only way they could think of to stop box breakers which is costing every operator a lot of money from hundreds of thousands to millions in wasted prepay subsidy heh.

Orange have the problem a lot worse than 3g so I guess that they will be monitoring the situation closely as will the other networks.

Woby_Tide

just wait until their Customer Services trot out the line, "Could you pop the SIM in another handset and check it's working?".

Instead I guess they will have to send out a whole new handset and SIM to replace any dodgy SIMcards in future.

kai666

MUHAMID wrote:

i got Motorola c975 last week and it says 'This phone is permanently lock on 3 network'so i think thats true.

all phones on pay as you go are locked to the network, but thats different from not being able to remove the sim

charlie12

This won't stop the boxbreakers. If the SIMs are glued in with epoxy as stated in the article, I'm sure they can be prised out with a sharp tool or a suitable chemical. If the contacts on the phone break, the boxbreakers will just solder in a new set (or a new sim holder). No big deal if the SIM card breaks. Job done.

So this will only really affect consumers who want to use a different SIM in the phone or to use their 3 SIM in a different handset.

Jarlawuk

charlie12 wrote:

This won't stop the boxbreakers. If the SIMs are glued in with epoxy as stated in the article, I'm sure they can be prised out with a sharp tool or a suitable chemical. If the contacts on the phone break, the boxbreakers will just solder in a new set (or a new sim holder). No big deal if the SIM card breaks. Job done.

So this will only really affect consumers who want to use a different SIM in the phone or to use their 3 SIM in a different handset.

It becomes a lot of extra effort when you factor in having to do the same process for hunderds/thousands of phones. Would you rather box break a 3g phone that needs all that effort or a orange one which requires less effort but has similar margins?

It's more deterrence more than prevention imo.