Advantages of unlocked cell phones?

[Mike@LG]

Just out of curiousity, if I were to get an unlocked cell phone, then how would I receive service/data/texts without having to pay a monthly bill? Does anyone have experience with this?
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[jonnybravo]

You'd still need to pay for service.

Unlocked just lets you use the phone on different carriers (provided the phone has the correct bands and the correct radio systems, GSM/CDMA).

Tmobile/ATT use GSM. Usually unlocking a branded phone of each carrier will work on the other but it might not be 100% (such as the MME texts not working properly). Getting a fully unlocked phone from the manufacturer will generally work on any carrier of the same radio system. The newer Nexus/Pixel line of phones will work out of the box on any carrier in the US.

Verizon/Sprint use CDMA. The same caveats apply.

In any event, if you're getting a carrier branded phone and plan to unlock it, make sure to mind your p's and q's. Look up the model and see what people have to say about it and if there are any quirks to be aware of.
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[ContagiousInspiration]

http://www.droid-life.com/2015/02/05/us-wireless-carrier-bands-gsm-cdma-wcdma-lte-verizon-att-sprint-tmobile/

[eureca]

The only no monthly bill services that I know of were/are ringplus and freedompop.

Ringplus you are late to the party it is going out of business in about a week. The call quality was not great, You paid a one time topup and possibly activation fee and if you didn't go over your minutes/text/data for the month there was no extra charge. If you did go over than overages were paid by the initial topup after that ran out you were charged another topup. You also had to listen to ads while the phone rang when making calls. It was good while it lasted at least for the data. In it's prime I got 8gb of data free every month. It got worse and worse though.

Freedompop is still out there but the reviews are pretty bad. It is something like 200 minutes 500 text/data free for the month, but they have shady practices to try to get money out of you. I would be careful with them.

[thegreatest]

Some Verizon/Sprint phones have the bands which would enable you to use it on T-Mobile/AT&T or any GSM carrier.

I don't believe that you can go between Sprint and Verizon with CDMA. As far as I know, unlocking just enables you to use different GSM carriers. I think you would need to flash the phone for CDMA.

Still, issues might come up when unlocking. Depending on the phone you might have trouble receiving MMS messages.

Another plus with unlocked phones is that if you travel to a different country, you should still be able to use your phone.
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[governator]

U can use it abroad with a foreign sim card