Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdolon | Hacker News Reader

There's a T-Mobile store in Queens, NY that was already doing this a week ago, they had a huge banner outside that said something to the extent of 'We sell and unlock iPhones.' I remember pointing it out to a friend and wondering how it was legal but I guess now it makes sense.

If anyone wants to check it out, it's at the corner of 74th and Broadway in Jackson Heights.

View on HN

That seems a little deceptive though, since you will only be able to get EDGE data.

I had a friend with a T-Mobile powered iPhone, got 3G and Edge no problem.

Can you supply some more details on this? The radio in the iPhone and T-mobile's 3G spectrum range are supposed to be incompatible (in other words the two operate on different ranges).

In Germany and The Netherlands, T-Mobile has been the official carrier for the iPhone for years. The T-Mobile brand is being used in a lot of countries.

T-Mobile USA is the odd one out, though. It was a preexisting network (VoiceStream) which after being purchased by Deutsche Telekom was given the T-Mobile name for the sake of international brand unity.

Curious, considering that T-Mobile's 3G network is on a frequency that iPhone hardware doesn't support. (U.S. iPhone, U.S. T-Mobile.)

It doesn't seem to work the other way around at least. I wasn't able to get 3G with an unlocked mytouch on AT&T's network.

Is there a list somewhere of the countries in which an unlocked iPhone will work with a prepaid sim?

I read on Fred Wilson's blog that it works in the UK (and presumably the rest of Western Europe). I am specifically wondering about Australia and Japan.

Can I buy an iPhone 4 in the USA, get it unlocked in Queens, and use it in Australia with a sim?

Edit - I'm mostly wondering if the radio in the US version of the phone supports the networks in .au and .jp.

It should work fine as long as you carrier unlock the iPhone. I'm not sure if this is available for the iPhone 4 yet though (due to baseband changes), I know it's possible for older generations. Don't waste your money getting it unlocked at a store though, do some research and use one of the many available free (and now legal) programs like blackra1n and quickpwn.

Yes, in Australia, not in Japan. The latter don't accept GSM SIMs. But it will work of course if you use a SIM card that let you roam in Japan, with normal (read: ridiculous) charges.

Any carrier unlocked iPhone will work with all the carriers in South Africa. The frequencies available are GSM 900/1800 and UMTS/HSDPA 2100 and all the carriers offer micro-SIMs if asked.

In fact, that's true for the rest of Africa too, where you're pretty much guaranteed to find at least one GSM 900/1800 network wherever you go and in many cases a UMTS/HSDPA 2100 3G network as well, though the coverage might not be as comprehensive as it is in South Africa.

My iPhone 3G worked perfectly in Australia once unlocked. Vodafone month-to-month with the 100MB data plan was the most economical option at the time.

starkfist, you'd need to get a prepaid microsim, which I'd imagine is not too common. Or, you could cut up a regular sim.

But will the radio work? I guess that is what I'm really asking... if the radio in the phone will work with networks in the USA, Japan and Australia. I'm going to add that to my original post.

As far as I can tell, there is only a single quad-band GSM + quad-band 3G/UMTS version of the iPhone; there don't seem to be any regional differences in the hardware. So as long as your target network supports a subset of those bands, you should be fine. In the US, CDMA networks won't work (Verizon, maybe others?), and in Japan you'll be limited to 3G as there's no GSM. Australia, like Europe, uses 900/1800MHz GSM, so you'll be fine.

The iPhone has an UMTS radio that supports the following bands: 850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz. For GSM/EDGE it supports the 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 MHz bands.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html

In the US, AT&T uses the 850 and 1900 Mhz bands. (There's no other network in the US that has iPhone-compatible 3G service.)

In Australia, Telstra uses the 850 Mhz band, others use the 2100 Mhz band.

In Japan, 1700 and 2100 Mhz bands are used.

All of these frequencies, except for the 1700 Mhz band, are supported by the iPhone 4.

http://www.worldtimezone.com/gsm.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com