Cellular Abroad and iPhone

Let us know how it goes with Cellular Abroad.

You have to have your phone unlocked in order for it to accept a SIM from another company. Your carrier will tell you how to do this (or maybe they will do it for you).

Verizon claims they have unlocked it for me... I'm going to call Cellular Abroad in a few and if that doesn't work, I'll go to a Verizon store.

Since it is a Verizon phone, are you sure that it is a GSM phone? Most Verizon phones are not.

Yes. It is an iPhone 4s, which is an international phone regardless of carrier. I was able to fix the problem, but I honestly have no idea how I resolved the issue. Thanks for responding!

Stephanie, I'd suggest contacting Cellular Abroad regarding this problem, as you may have to enter some "settings" to get the card to work. Are you able to call them from a "land line" or other phone, so that you can troubleshoot the problem with their SIM in the iPhone? One other question - does the voice or text functions work with the Cellular Abroad SIM installed? Good luck!

You said that Verizon unlocked the phone for you. I'm not very familiar with iPhones, but with every other cell phone in existence, to unlock the phone, you have to put in the codes to unlock it. It can't be done remotely by the company. If this is true for the iPhone, your phone may not yet be unlocked.

Steve, "They also give you an option to "upgrade" your software at the same time" In some cases, downloading new OS software causes the phones to "re-lock". Hopefully that wouldn't be the case if the unlocking was provided by AT&T.

Paul, AT&T just unlocked an old IPhone of mine. after I called them up and gave them the IMEI number, they sent me an email, had me log into iTunes, and had me do a "backup and restore", and voila, it was unlocked. I verified that the unlock worked by sticking a TMobile SIM in it. Stephanie, call Customer Support. (Put your old chip back in and call, or better yet, go visit.) And let us know what you find out.

Steve, thanks for the clarification. Leave it to Apple to do it a different way, although I admit this way might be easier for most users. Did you lose all the data and configuration when you did the backup and restore? With other phones, I've lost nothing when I had them unlocked.

Paul, the "backup" backs up! all of your data on your computer, then the "restore" restores that data, and downloads the "unlock". They also give you an option to "upgrade" your software at the same time, but that is not necessary.

Ken, an AT&T unlock is supposedly a permanent unlock; but the only permanent thing I am sure about is Death and Taxes.......... I do know that if you do a "software unlock" that upgrades (say from 5.0.1 to 5.1 software) your software unlock is nullified. My old 3g was "software unlocked" (and "jailbroken"), but luckily the latest software for that old phone does not kill either my unlock or jailbreak. I used a pay-per-month ($45, StraightTalk.com) unlimited! talk, text and data chip in that phone. It worked great.

Steve, Thanks for the info. The software upgrade from one OS version to a newer one is what I was referring to. In some cases, iPhones will "re-lock" when that's done. Hopefully when AT&T does the unlock, that won't happen. I haven't heard of StraightTalk, but will have a look.