Buying a locked phone means that you will not be able to use it with another service provider. A locked phone will create restrictions on your abilities to maximize the utility of your phone. It prohibits you from switching service providers if you want to get a better rate. To be able to achieve your freedom of using another service provider, you will need to unlock your phone. When it comes to unlocking phones, there are many things that you need to keep in mind. There are also several options that you can choose.
In this article, we will be discussing the things that you need to know when it comes to network unlocking your phone.
Requirements
If you want to unlock your phone, you will first need to identify your phone status. It would be best if you recognized which service provider your phone is locked to. Depending on the service provider and the phone type, different conditions are involved. Our phones were locked to AT&T, and AT&T has a simple unlock process if you are eligible. Different carriers have different requirements. You should also check if the phone is already unlocked because some service providers automatically unlock it after a specified amount of time, depending on the instalment. This processing of confirming the phone status can be time-consuming.
Before you choose to unlock your phone and switch carriers, you will need to acquire several essential pieces of information. For AT&T, the things that we needed were only the account phone number, the IMEI number of the device, and a completed device payment plan. After knowing all that, you need to find out the best way to do what you need to do.
Some carriers provide online methods. However, not all of them do. Therefore, you will need to contact their customer support to verify.
Software and Services
Besides doing it yourself (if you are eligible), you can also hire services and download software packages that can do the job for you. Software packages can be downloaded, and you can follow the instructions so that your phone can be unlocked. Using software to unlock your phone is often not recommended as it can void the warranty or, even worse, brick your phone.
Many companies provide services to unlock your phone online.
We passed on the software option as our phones are too new and too expensive to risk anything going wrong. When attempting the phone unlock method for both AT&T locked iPhone 11 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy S20 we found out that we were not eligible to unlock it yet from the official AT&T website. We received the message from AT&T stating our request was denied due to to the fact that our devices had not been paid off completely so we had to search for alternatives. When evaluating our best course of action, we compared the process, pricing, and email responsiveness from several online websites offering such services. We started with a list of 16 such websites, and based on these few factors, we were able to narrow our list down to just a few sites that seemed the most competent, trustworthy, and cost-effective.
The results
Ultimately we decided to go with UnlockMySim.com and CanadaUnlocking.com. Although they were not the cheapest from our list, we found them to be the trustworthy and most accommodating option. After 13 hours, we received the code for our Samsung Galaxy phone, and our new iPhone was unlocked in under three days. If you want a quick fix, you should opt for using these services to do the job.
Summary
We were satisfied with the results as the whole process seemed a lot easier and faster than we initially imagined. More specifically, for iPhone unlocking, the winner was CanadaUnlocking.com and for Samsung, our recommended provider was UnlockMySIM.com.
