Getting a Canadian iPhone to work with an AT&T GoPhone SIM card, Conclusion

Back from vacation in Virginia Beach, and I thought I'd let all know that the AT&T SIM card I put in my Canadian iPhone 3G has worked flawlessly for the complete duration of my trip.

I had read on different sites that AT&T might deactivate the SIM, supposedly because they could detect that my phone was canadian, but no such thing happened.

So, I definitely recommend using the GoPhone SIM card in the iPhone 3G. As for the iPhone 4, it doesn't work as far as I can tell.

Getting a Canadian iPhone to work with an AT&T GoPhone SIM card, Part 5

Well, I'm now on highway 87 driving down to VA beach, and although coverage is spotty at best, I can now confirm that the GoPhone SIM card works in my jailbroken and unlocked iPhone 3G.

Getting a Canadian iPhone to work with an AT&T GoPhone SIM card, Part 4

Yesterday, I tried to get my old iPhone 3G to work with the GoPhone SIM.

The challenge was to jailbreak the phone, as it's not compatible with jailbreakme.com. After a few trials and errors, I finally succeeded jailbreaking it with redsn0w, although it seems that since I was on iOS 4.2.1, there's now no way to bring it back to "factory settings" as far as the baseband is concerned : I'm stuck with the iPad baseband (6.xx), which is required for the unlocking to work. I of course then unlocked the phone with ultrasn0w.

Had I known that I was going to use my 3G phone instead of my new iPhone 4, I wouldn't have cut the SIM into a MicroSIM. But the damage was done, and so I had to come up with a quick fix for that. I just took an old satellite access card and cut a regular SIM out of it, and then cut the inside of that so that I could fit my GoPhone MicroSIM in it, and voilà, I had my MicroSIM-to-SIM adapter.

I then proceeded to insert them in my iPhone 3G, and the result is encouraging : no "SIM failure" message, just the phone working normally, but showing "Network unavailable" in the top-left.

We'll know tomorrow, when I'm in an AT&T tower range, whether the setup works or not.

Getting a Canadian iPhone to work with an AT&T GoPhone SIM card, Part 3

Quick update : I drove down to the US border last night to try the GoPhone SIM card in my iPhone 4 within range of an AT&T tower.

Turns out I'm getting the same behavior as I did at home in Montreal : I either get the "SIM failure" message, or if I put the phone in airplane mode and reboot, I then get one network bar and no connection to the AT&T network.

After further research this morning, I have found that the baseband used by my iPhone, 04.10.01, can not be unlocked by ultrasnow. I'm at version 4.3.3 of iOS by the way.

I'm looking right now at other avenues, namely :

- trying to install a custom iOS (with different baseband) onto my phone, I don't know if that's at all possible
- trying the SIM in my old iPhone 3G (I don't remember which iOS version / baseband it was on).