It is just another cell phone shop on a side street in Milan’s Chinatown, but come here often enough and buy a plastic phone cover or little trinket each time and sooner or later you will have earned the confidence of the twentysomething behind the counter. After
that, all you need is euro 20 to get your phone unlocked.
Unlock, hack, crack — the terms are numerous, the result is the same: a mobile phone that will work with any SIM card on any carrier’s GSM network in any country around the world. And just as you can get it done at the little Milan shop squeezed between a Chinese restaurant and a food store, there are people who will do it for a fee in most cities from here to Hanoi.
Wireless carriers often offer customers cheap or free phones in exchange for signing multiyear contracts, but then the phones are technologically “locked” — the subscriber cannot cancel the contract and sign up for service with another company.
But the temptation of better service, lower prices, a newer phone or just the desire to show that it can be done has motivated people to unlock phones pretty much since the first locks appeared.
About 70 percent of the phones sold in European countries where operators cover all or part of the cost of the handset are sold locked because the operators want to recoup their subsidies, said Carolina Milanesi, a research director with Gartner in Britain. In the three European countries where handsets are usually sold at market prices — Belgium, Finland and Italy — probably 30 percent of the phones are sold locked, she said.
Milanesi said that almost all phones are locked in the United States when people sign up with an operator; likewise with Japan, although the situation varies elsewhere in Asia.
If…