I’m out of town with my wife, attending a business conference, and her cell phone has just died. She has the AT&T “pay as you go” service where you simply pay by the minute with no contract, so I figure the simple solution is to just buy a new $30 phone and port the number over. I go to Radio Shack (the nearest AT&T vendor to our hotel) and they claim that it cannot be done – the can’t port a pay-as-you-go number into a new pay-as-you-go phone. Well, OK. So as an experiment I swap SIM cards between her phone and mine, and viola! my phone has her number. Clearly I just need to get a new phone, and put her old SIM card into it. I go back to Radio Shack to buy a new phone, and during the transaction, I let slip what I am planning to do. Instantly, the clerk grabs the phone from me, and runs away into the back room of the store, claiming that he can’t complete the transaction, he can’t sell me a phone if I’m going to swap SIMs, and his store has been fined thousands of dollars for doing that.
WTF is that all about? I finally found an AT&T store a few blocks away, went there, and explained the problem. Their solution was to sell me a new $30 phone and swap the SIM card. What on Earth was the moron from RS thinking? I thought it was well-established that phone users have the right to modify their own equipmet; thus the market for unlocked cell phones.
Radio Shack is lying to you. They CAN do it, but they generally won’t (at least not at the advertised price), since they’ll lose money on the transaction. They can sell you the phone for that price plus $200 (this from a few years ago, it may be higher now), but again, they probably won’t at most stores, because while they don’t lose money, they don’t make any, either.
Maybe the Radio Shack you went to was “fined” not by the government, but by a regional corporate office. If they lose money on that sort of thing, they would want to have some disincentives to prevent the individual stores from doing it.
Phone users do not have the right to modify their own equipment. It depends on the contract. Your service contract may say you may not modify your equipment in any way. An unlocked cell phone might be considered a black market (or gray market) item. You’ve heard about the guy who figured out how to unlock his iPhone–it voided his warranty, although I don’t know if he suffered any penalties from AT&T.
However, switching SIM cards is in no way modifying the equipment, any more than replacing the battery. Radio Shack is probably making their money from selling accounts, not the handsets, so they don’t want you to throw the SIM card away. They might get some kind of residual revenue from the usage charges.
BTW I thought AT&T ran a CDMA network. SIM cards are for GSM phones. What gives?
We use hundreds of cell phone/radios here at our place ( trucking company ) and swap SIM cards all the time. The radios are so cheap in bulk that we don’t even buy new batteries! It is better to upgrade the driver with a new phone and old SIM card.
I have used the same card in 4 phones in the last 5 years.
radio Shack wants to sell contracts, not phones.
The sales-drone claimed it was AT&T that fined them. I can see how they’d get a cut from selling a normal contract-based phone, where there is a minimum guaranteed income-stream from the customer based on the terms of the contract. It seems odd that AT&T would pay a “bounty” on the service for a pay-as-you-go plan, though, since there is no guarantee of future income from such a phone.
Here in Australia (and also the UK, FWIW), you have a right by law to have your phone “unlocked” from a network. They are allowed to charge you for this, and it’s generally between $50-$100 here.
We sell a crapload of pre-paid mobile phones on Monday to all the teenagers and partygoing 20-somethings who lost their phones over the weekend. Since the average pre-paid mobile phone here costs $100, people don’t see it as a huge thing to just buy another phone.
We don’t do phone contracts at our store, though. Far too much work and there’s nothing in it for us profit, commission, or sales-wise- especially seeing how many pre-paid phones well sell (which usually have better deals than the contracts anyway, FWIW).
No, you have that backwards. They DON’T make money from selling the handsets. They DO make money from selling contracts. Basically, the service provider pays Radio Shack around $200 for each completed contract. The handsets themselves are sold at a very small profit margin, or in many cases, a loss. They make their money primarily on the contract, and secondly on the accessories–all of which have HUGE gross margins, BTW.
This based upon my experience as a former RS store manager several years ago.
Its still an activation even though it is prepaid, and they get a big spiff off of that being an indirect dealer when the new sim is activated, or it was that way five years ago when I was in the mobile business.
Slight correction AT&T was TDMA. My understanding is that GSM was gradually being phased out as it couldn’t handle the 3G features, but that’s now in disarray as Qualcomm got busted trying to screw it’s partners on CDMA patents, as well as Google’s plans for entering the market when the FCC auctions off the old analog TV spectrum.
Oh, and Rat Shack employees tend to be rather poorly trained at best.
TDMA, more properly known as IS-54 and IS-136 D-AMPS was the first digital successor to the North American analog cellphone system, AMPS. It is being replaced by GSM and CDMA:
My understanding (though I admit I am unable to identify a cite that states this explicitly) is that both TDMA and CDMA are digital. AT&T definitely operated using TDMA prior to moving to GSM.