{"id":163,"date":"2007-10-04T19:18:40","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T00:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/04\/unlocking-my-cingular-att-phone\/"},"modified":"2007-10-04T19:22:30","modified_gmt":"2007-10-05T00:22:30","slug":"unlocking-my-cingular-att-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/04\/unlocking-my-cingular-att-phone\/","title":{"rendered":"Unlocking my Cingular \/ AT&T phone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AT&T<\/a><\/p>\n

AT&T allows some customers to "unlock" their phones. This allows the use of a SIM card from a different provider (for example, VodaFone) while traveling. (It also allows you to use the phone with another GSM provider in the US after your AT&T contract is finished, which is one reason AT&T and other carriers lock the phones they subsidize.) <\/p>\n

I don't know exactly what makes a customer "eligible" to have a phone unlocked, but I suspect that you have to have made several payments on time and be in good standing. When I am under a new contract with a subsidized phone I typically wait a few months (in this case, about 6) before calling in to ask to have my phone unlocked. I've had T-Mobile unlock three phones (under 2 different contracts) for me in the past, but this was the first time I tried it with AT&T.  <\/p>\n

I suspect that AT&T has an official policy of making it difficult to unlock your phone. Here is my experience:<\/p>\n

On my first call (September 25th) the customer service representative asked for my phone's IMEI (a phone Specific ID number which can be found by entering *#06#) and put me on hold for ten minutes. After that wait, they confirmed that I was "eligible" for unlocking, and said they would send me the unlock code and instructions via email, with an expected resolution on the afternoon of October 3rd. (Yes, that's 8 days to look up the subsidy unlock code…) The entire call took around ten minutes. <\/p>\n

Commentary:<\/em> The process of retrieving a subsidy unlock code using an IMEI should take all of 1 minute if the customer service agent had access to the database. If they had to submit a ticket for a higher level  technician to look up and return the unlock code it should still take only a few hours. The only reason I can think of for delaying at this point is to hope the user forgets about asking for the unlock code.<\/p>\n

Nine days later, I had not received an email with the unlock code, so I called AT&T back on October 4th at 6:18pm. After spending a few minutes on hold waiting for a customer service representative, I was connected with Louise. After I had explained why I was calling, she asked if she could put me on (silent) hold, and I sat on the line for six minutes before she came back, apologized for the delay, and asked if she could put me on (silent) hold again, which lasted another 8 minutes before she came back on the line. At this point she gave me the subsidy unlock code (an 8 digit number) and the instructions for using them. [Insert a foreign (non-AT&T) SIM card, enter the number.]  The entire call took 24 minutes.<\/p>\n

Commentary: <\/em>Either Louise (and AT&T's customer support system) is terribly slow, or the two (6 and 8 minute) holds are designed to make the customer give up before their phone is unlocked.  The wait time was longer than with T-Mobile (although I also had to make a 2nd (follow-up) call to T-Mobile on one occasion.) All in all getting a phone unlocked is annoying enough to prevent people from doing it casually, but not quite difficult enough for AT&T to get hit with a class action lawsuit. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AT&T allows some customers to "unlock" their phones. This allows the use of a SIM card from a different provider (for example, VodaFone) while traveling. (It also allows you to use the phone with another GSM provider in the US … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-phones","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}