Cellphone Unlocking Worth Very Little Without Device Interoperability

[Commentary] Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn will likely have a few months to leave her mark – and one of the issues she has chosen to champion is cellphone unlocking.

In response to her recent statement in support of cellphone unlocking, CTIA- The Wireless Association Vice President Scott Bergmann responded with a statement of his own saying that the CTIA “looks forward to working with the commission” but also noting that the industry already offers a wide range of cellphone unlocking options. He noted, for example, that there are already more than 240 unlocked devices available for purchase from a wireless carrier, retail store or directly from the manufacturer. He suggested that the matter might be addressed through education, stating that CTIA would like to work with the FCC to “ensure that consumers are aware of the wide variety of unlocked devices that are available.”

What neither Chairwoman Clyburn nor Bergmann mentioned is that cellphone unlocking increasingly will be irrelevant unless more is done to make handsets interoperable. The reason is that as the major carriers roll out 4G networks based on LTE, each one is using a different spectrum band or combination of spectrum bands – and handsets are designed to work only in the bands that an individual carrier needs. If one of their devices were to be unlocked, there would be few, if any, other networks to take it to.