By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-12-17 12:40:26 | Word Count: 664
Everyone has had the experience of wanting to get out of their cell phone contract, and having a devil of a time doing it! In the first place, it’s going to cost you big bucks. How much depends on how far into your contract you are, how long you signed on for, and even who you bought it from.
These days, the cheapest way out of a contract is still going to cost you around $175 bucks. If you had the misfortune of signing up for that service at a kiosk in the mall, well, it’s going to cost you a bit more than that, up to $400—even if you are near to the end of the contract term. Most people have no idea that the kiosk in the mall is NOT the cell phone company. They are a third party 99% of the time. That means that on top of the penalty charges you accrue from the actual service provider, the third party company is going to definitely charge you some money as well. You end up getting double-punished.
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After you’ve paid a hefty fee to get out of the contract, you are still might have to eat the cost of the phone you’re left with, because carriers like Verizon and Sprint lock their models for use only on their networks by using CDMA models that don’t have SIM cards, so they cannot be unlocked. But you do have the option of trying to sell your GSM phone back on eBay or to someone you know, but for them (or you) to use it on a different carrier, it will probably have to be sold to someone using a CDMA carrier, or otherwise it will have to be unlocked. Even if you can manage to unlock it, you could lose many of the features of the phone. The way around this is to get it professionally unlocked or buy an unlocked phone in the first place.
Once you have an unlocked phone capable of being used with different carriers, you’re going to need a service to use it on. If you are looking to use your cell phone without a contract, then the most widely used option is to go with a pre-paid phone service, such as Straight Talk from Wal-Mart. Prepaid services are great if you’ve been burned a couple times by your contract service.
