All US carriers now required to unlock off-contract cell phones



As of today, all of the major wireless companies in the US have promised to abide by policy agreements laid down by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) regarding device unlocking. These guidelines, first proposed in 2013, require carriers to disclose their policies on prepaid and postpaid device unlocking, offer unlocks to all owners of postpaid devices and prepaid devices after one year, to notify customers when their hardware qualifies for unlocking, to respond within two business days to requests for an unlock, and to unlock devices for deployed military personnel.

February 11 was the deadline for implementation of the CTIA’s policies, which means that starting today, all major US carriers should be on the same page. Note, however, that this doesn’t necessarily mean all carriers will adopt the same policies regarding when they unlock products or which devices they’ll unlock while still on-contract. Customers of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Verizon can view each company’s respective policies at the links provided.

A long and winding road

The path to legalize cell phone unlocks hasn’t been a simple one. In 2006 and 2010 the Library of Congress granted exceptions to the DMCA’s ban on bypassing any form of copy protection and allowed end users to legally unlock their devices. It refused to continue granting the exemption in 2012, citing the fact that many carriers offered some form of unlocking procedure or policy.


Services like this will likely stick around for those who don’t want to pay early contract fees.

While this was accurate, as far as it went, it also highlighted one of the problems in the DMCA as it currently exists. The ban on bypassing any form of copy protection, for any reason, means that there’s no guaranteed right to continue doing so when a Library of Congress exception expires. This, in turn, meant that carriers could have chosen to stop offering unlock options and left end users little recourse.

This potential problem was cleared up in two ways. First, the CTIA proposed policy rules that all the major carriers agreed to, with February 11, 2014 as the official adoption deadline. Second, President Obama signed the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act on August 1, 2014. That bill repealed the 2012 Library of Congress decision and made it legal for consumers to unlock their own devices. Presumably this means that the US has abandoned one of the negotiating points of the Trans Pacific Partnership Treaty, which previously stipulated that cell phone unlocking be made illegal.

Note that the simple act of unlocking the device doesn’t always guarantee that the phone can be moved between carriers. Compatibility between vendors will depend on the phone’s modem and configuration, so users still have to evaluate which devices can be taken to which networks on a case-by-case basis.