Most likely, your cell phone is locked with one service provider, such as Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T.; If you try to leave that company, your phone won’t work. If you travel to another country and try to use another company’s cell phone service on your old phone, that won’t work either.
But, depending on what kind of phone you have and what cell phone carrier you have, you might be able to “unlock” your phone, or free it from the lock that keeps it with a certain company. That means that you will be able to use the same phone with different companies, after all, you did pay for it.
Is Unlocking Legal?
Is it legal? Yes. The U.S. Copyright Office issued a ruling in 2006, declaring that unlocking a cell phone does not infringe on the copyright of the manufacture, or the carrier.***But, unlocking a phone might violate ToS (Terms of Service), or any contracts you may have signed, resulting in penalties.***
There are two types of cellular technologies that are currently being used by the world’s cell phone carriers:
Global System for Mobile communication (GSM)
Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)
If you have a GSM phone, then your phone is unlockable. However, if your phone operates on a CDMA network, then it is completely locked.
What is the difference?
GSM phones use SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) Cards. A SIM Card is a small card that is inserted into the phone. It is the memory chip, holding your information, contacts, and settings. It is also linked to your account. You can take your SIM Card out, put it into another phone, and if someone calls your number, the new phone will ring. You can also put a different SIM Card in your unlocked phone, and your phone will then work with whatever phone number and account is linked to that card. CDMA phones have no SIM cards and must be authenticated by the service provider, which makes unlocking a phone impossible.
If a phone is locked, the service provider has installed some software on the phone that ties the “Subscriber ID” number on the SIM Card to the serial number of that particular phone. If the SIM Card and phone serial number don’t match, the phone simply won’t work. The SIM Card won’t work in other phones, and the phone won’t work with other SIM Cards.
T-Mobile and AT&T; use GSM, while Verizon and Sprint use CDMA.
How to Unlock GSM Phones:
The process of unlocking a phone is actually quite simple, and doesn’t require any technical knowledge. For some phones, you just have to enter a numeric code into the phone. For a fee, some service providers will even give you the proper unlock code for your phone. There are also third party companies that provide cell phone unlock codes for a fee that ranges from $5 to about $25, depending on the model of phone you have.
Some phones need to be connected to a special device through the phone’s data port to be unlocked. Again, a few service providers offer this service, but most phone owners will have to turn to third parties to accomplish this. You pay them a fee, send them your phone, they unlock it and send it back.
But that is only for cell phones. For Smartphones, see below.
How to Unlock Smartphones:
Smartphones are slightly harder to unlock. They are essentially handheld mobile computers. Unlocking them is a lot harder than just the simple linking of serial numbers and account numbers seen in regular cell phones.
Smartphones are often locked to a service provider. For example, the iPhone is locked to the AT&T; network. For some smartphone owners, unlocking isn’t a matter of wanting to change service providers; they just want to control what applications they can install on their device. A lot of smartphone manufacturers lock the devices so that only approved applications can be installed. For example, the iPhone can only install apps purchased from Apple’s App Store. If there’s an application you want to install that isn’t officially approved and offered by Apple, you’re out of luck. That is, unless you can unlock your smartphone.
It’s possible to purchase unlocked iPhones, or you can apply a software crack to an iPhone to unlock it. This is often referred to as “jailbreaking” the phone. Because the software on a smartphone is more complicated than a cell phone’s, the unlocking process is more difficult than simply entering a code. The software cracks can have unpredictable results, rendering some features of the phone (or the phone itself) non-functional.
