While a voluntary agreement on cellphone unlocking (CD...

While a voluntary agreement on cellphone unlocking (CD Dec 13 p3) is an important step, more work needs to be done, said Gene Sperling, assistant to the president for economic policy, in a blog post (http://1.usa.gov/1fbV69l). “The FCC and carriers are doing their part,” wrote Sperling, who also directs the White House National Economic Council. “Now it is time for Congress to step up and finish the job by passing the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, which was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee this summer, and its companion in the Senate. We know this is an important issue to many of you. The Administration will continue to watch it closely in the coming months.” Sperling noted that last March more than 114,000 signed an electronic petition on the White House’s “We the People” platform in support of mobile phone unlocking. Fletcher Heald lawyer Mitchell Lazarus said in a blog post Friday the agreement only goes so far. “While a definite improvement, CTIA’s action solves only part of the problem,” Lazarus said (http://bit.ly/IUf6lN). “If I buy a subsidized phone from Carrier A, I certainly owe them two years of payments on the phone. But I should be able to keep up just the phone payments, and stop paying Carrier A for service as well, if I want to take the phone to Carrier B for service. CTIA’s position does not allow this. T-Mobile is the only major company so far that properly separates the phone and service payments. We hope the others follow its lead.” The agreement also must be adopted into the “CTIA Consumer Code for Wireless Service” and doesn’t mean that a subscriber will be able to readily use a phone on a second network, he said. “CTIA’s letter points out the technical limitations on ‘unlocking': ‘[U]locking’ a device will not necessarily make a device interoperable with other networks -- a device designed for one network is not made technologically compatible with another network merely by ‘unlocking’ it. Additionally, unlocking a device may enable some functionality of the device but not all (e.g., an unlocked device may support voice services but not data services when activated on a different network)."