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At least here in Canada still seems like they would maintain a fair amount of control with their normal 3 year contracts and high cancellation fees.

3 years!?. Wow!.
Spanish contracts are on average of 18 months and from the first year on you can generally change telecom without having to pay any fee.

Don't forget.. We don't get our phones unlocked when we get out of our contract.

Rogers and Telus (I've tried) will not give out the unlock codes. The usual way to unlock is to have someone online give out one based off an IMEI number.

New Zealand and Australia are two countries I know of which have contract phones but don't have SIM card locks - just because you have a contract doesn't mean that it has to have the SIM card locked because you're still going to have to keep paying the contract even if you destroyed the mobile phone or moved the sim from one device to another device. The idea that some how the business model is destroyed because of the lack of SIM lock in simply ignores how a contract operates and the fact that you keep paying regardless of whether you use *THAT* particular phone you pay for. If you want to get out of that contract then you have to pay to get out of it - normally paying the difference between the full price and subsidised price plus a small penalty.

It is the same in Germany. Sim lock is only used for pre-paid plans, where you can opt out at any time by simply not loading new money onto the phone.

The data plans an iphone ships with are not affected by that.

Edited 2010-11-20 21:07 UTC

New Zealand and Australia are two countries I know of which have contract phones but don't have SIM card locks - just because you have a contract doesn't mean that it has to have the SIM card locked because you're still going to have to keep paying the contract even if you destroyed the mobile phone or moved the sim from one device to another device. "

Canada is the same way, at least with GSM phones.

Telus and Bell, with their old CDMA phone, locked the phone number to the phone to the contract requiring lots of hoop-jumping and paperwork to swap phones mid-contract.

Rogers, though, the phone number is locked to the SIM and nothing else. What you do with the SIM is up to you. Nothing stops you from popping the SIM out of one phone, popping it into another phone, and making calls/transferring data as per normal. We've even used that to transfer phone books between phones when the wife has lost her phone. We regularly trade phones when hers is in the shop, so that I use the crappy loaner.

Don't know how Telus/Bell GMS/HSPA SIMs work, or how any of the PAYG companies work with SIM cards.

I've never understood the reasoning for keeping the SIM card internal to the phone, or locking a specific SIM to a specific card.

This is not about the North American market though.