About a month ago, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler gave the U.S. wireless industry an ultimatum: choose to get on board with unlocking people’s phones or face regulatory action forcing it to do so. Today, the CTIA — the wireless industry trade association — and Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular have acceded to Wheeler’s demands by recommending that his policies be incorporated into the CTIA Consumer Code for Wireless Service. According to a letter sent to by the CTIA to the FCC, this means that the telcos mentioned above “will move quickly to implement these principles” in total within a year. In case you forgot, this means that within 12 months those companies will:
- provide a clear, concise and readily accessible policy on unlocking
- unlock mobile devices for legitimate owners of those devices once their service contract has been fulfilled
- notify customers when their devices are eligible to be unlocked and/or automatically unlock those devices for free (but they can charge a reasonable if you aren’t a current customer)
- unlock devices or provide an explanation of a denial of any unlock requests within two days
- unlock devices for military service men and women upon deployment
Source: CTIA letter (PDF)
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