There is a whole sub-industry within the field of the mobile phone market place related to the jailbreak or unlocking of the mobile phones so that they can be used on any cellular network, and recent Supreme Court decisions in the USA handed down have confirmed that the jailbreak industry is legal and legitimate. That is, end-user customers are quite within their legal rights to do what they wish to their mobile phone handset to enable the phone to work on other network carriers which is commonly known as jailbreak or unlocking the network block.
The concept of locking mobile phones first arose as a marketing ploy by some of the major mobile phone networks and the manufacturers of the phone hardware whereby a network was given exclusive access to market a model of phones whereby the manufacturer would add blocks into the phone to limit which carrier network the phone would work on. Often this meant that the authorized carrier would then finance the very high price they charged for the telephone by locking the customer into a long-term contract, and the courts have found such financing arrangements to also be legal – providing there has been full disclosure to the end-user. However, the courts have found there is no legal basis to prevent the customer doing what they wish to the telephone, including the right to use software or alternative SIM-cards to bypass the network block previously installed on the telephone by the manufacturer.
To jailbreak the Apple brand called the iPhone has been particularly popular because of Apple’s propensity to do these exclusive marketing deals with mobile phone carriers in the various markets around the World, and there is no question that to jailbreak iPhone hardware is very simple and effective. The customer is always still obliged to pay the originating carrier for the financed phone, yet the end-user is able to make calls with other network carriers legally and without constraint.