If you’ve paid a low price for a phone it is because the price is being subsidized by the cell phone company because they tie your purchase of the phone at a cheap rate to the service.
No you paid a lower price because you also had to sign on for two years with a hard biting early out penalty. Once you are out of contract, you should be able to use your phone on any network you like.
It was explained to me by customer service that Qwest customers on the Sprint network were given the very lowest priority, so that any time a tower was filled to capacity we were the first to be bumped off. For months we were promised that the situation would improve soon.
I assumed that if we went switched to Sprint which meant we would have to pay nearly twice as much per month that at least we would get better service. I also assumed that we would be able to use our expensive Qwest phones. Our service did improve, but Sprint said that they could not allow us to use our Qwest phones because of an agreement that the two companies had made to help prevent Qwest customers whose contracts were up from switching to Sprint. It was apparently part of the tower sale agreement. So we had to buy new phones to use the same network.
We purchased another set of expensive phones, and our service improved immediately. I still have those expensive old phones sitting in a closet and I am still mad about it. That is what this “unlocking” thing is about... keeping customers who own their phones and are out of contract from switching to the up and coming pay as you go providers.