How it works in Canada: whether you pay off the phone entirely or not, pay 3 months in a row to the carrier you bought the locked phone from and then you can pay an additional $50+tax to have it unlocked. While it's nice the CRTC (our FCC basically) required this, it's terrible in that most carriers were either doing free/cheap unlocks after 3 months or $50 anytime after your device was paid for. Feels like we ended up with a mandated "worse" option to me.