Moving to Canada-- any hope of unlocking officially?

Question

My son's just moved to Canada. He has an iPhone which was on our family plan. We had called and talked to AT&T service about what to do, and they told me that I could cancel his contract early for $100 because he was leaving the country. My son tried out their international plan for Canada for a month, but it is outrageously expensive compared to plans within Canada, so he wants to switch to a Canadian plan. So I called AT&T to cancel the service today and found out that although they will cancel his service, they still won't unlock the phone. Any suggestions, other than unlocking illegally? I assume that was in the very fine print when he signed up for the phone.

Answer 1

Paula Goodfellow wrote:
I guess that's what we'll have to do. I could take it myself but then I'd be upgrading to an iPhone contract, and I'm not thrilled with giving AT&T more money at this point.
For some reason I thought you had one already. As said, you don't need to change anything about your contract when you acquire an iPhone by other means than giving AT&T more money. Just put your AT&T SIM-card in and you're essentially set. I'd highly recommend either having a data plan or waiting until monday for iOS 4.0 to do that though (as it allows you to turn off cellular data entirely.)
I suppose we have learned our lesson with AT&T. I'm not sure what my son is planning to do at this point.
Well the lesson to be learned is about locked products. Especially if the provider refuses under any circumstance to unlock them. (Where I live, carriers are required to unlock phones; they can charge to do so within a year of buying it but after that it must be free). Unfortunately for Americans, AT&T is the only large operator that uses standard UMTS frequencies. T-Mobile has UMTS but it uses a frequency (1700MHz) that no one else in the world uses. So unless you manage to procure a multiband phone from T-Mobile you won't be 3G'ing anywhere else in the world, and vice versa if you get a standard phone it won't do 3G with T-Mobile. (Luckily their GSM is standard so you can always use it to, you know, call people.) So essentially if you want compatibility with the rest of the world, you're stuck with AT&T. A Sprint or Verizon phone won't work at all in Europe, for instance.