Unlocking an iPhone 3G from Telia

Today I managed to properly unlock my iPhone 3G, which was previously locked to the Telia operator in Denmark. Due to the incompetence of Telia’s customer service, something which should have taken a couple of hours took a total of 7(!) days, during which time my phone was not working. By sharing this, and the solution below, I hope others won’t have to waste so much time.

After the lock-in period with Telia had expired (in Denmark that is 6 months by law), I called their customer service to have my iPhone unlocked, so I could use the SIM card from the operator I had switched to. The support person told me that he had now unlocked the iPhone, and all I had to do was connect it to iTunes, for the unlock to take effect.

But it didn’t work. The display still showed the “SIM locked”. To make a long story short, I then spent the next 5 days repeatedly calling customer service, where they listened to me tell them that whatever they’re doing wan’t working, and then made me wait 24 hours (the response time of their technical support), before telling me to try the same thing again. I must have gone through about 7-8 CS representatives, all of which kept telling me to try the same (incorrect) procedure.

What they SHOULD have told me, and what I found out after finally getting a technical support guy to call me, was to connect the iPhone to iTunes AND THEN hit the restore button to restore to factory defaults. After that, I was able to unlock the iPhone.

….which lasted for 3 hours….

After about 3 hours, I had to turn off the iPhone, and the phone was locked again! Imagine my disappointment. Fortunately, after some time I found out that resetting to factory defaults had also re-enabled the iPhone’s SIM PIN. So I was seeing “SIM locked” not because the phone was locked to the operator, but because I had not yet entered the PIN code. Restoring the phone once more, and going to “Settings”->”Phone”->”SIM PIN” allowed me to turn the SIM PIN code off, and everything was back to normal.

So the procedure should have been:

1. Have Telia unlock the iPhone.
2. Connect to iTunes, and hit the restore button. Remember not to restore from a backup when it asks you – set up a “new” phone instead. We want to clear the operator settings.
3. Browse to “Settings”->”Phone”->”SIM PIN”, and flip the SIM PIN toggle, if you don’t want to enter the PIN code every time you turn your iPhone off and on again.

I hope that helps someone. I am certainly never going to use Telia as an operator ever again. I prefer Telmore, which has always been completely reliable, and never caused me any grief.