Authorized iPhone 4 Unlock not working

[crusaderlast]

Hi,

After receiving the confirmation email from order@ecom.wireless.att-mail.com about 2 months back, I performed the steps as mentioned last week and updated my iPhone 4 to latest iOS 6 using restore feature of itunes. I had my international sim inserted in the phone while restoring the latest iOS. But I am still not able to use any sim other than AT&T. It first asked to "activate" the phone with AT&T sim and after I did it, it shows a message "Invalid Sim" and "Sim failure" for the international sim. I am currently travelling India and urgently need my phone unlocked to use local sim cards.

Please help !

[crusaderlast]

Just to add...I never got "Your iPhone is successfully unlocked" message during restore & back process.

[dwill05]

Did you phone work with an international SIM prior to installing iOS 6?

If you never got the unlock message during the restore process, then it doesn't sound like your phone was ever unlocked. Getting an email from AT&T doesn't mean that the phone is unlocked. At best it means that they sent a request to Apple to unlock the phone. Only after Apple updates the servers and you restore the phone is it actually unlocked.

[cousintim]

Contact AT&T CS as only they can help you.

Free advice for all:  Don't update your phone when you are traveling and don't update your phone when you are performing an unlock.

[crusaderlast]

My phone was on iOS 4 earlier and always locked to AT&T. I understand that AT&T might have already sent the request to Apple for unlock but how can I verify from Apple? I waited almost 2 months hoping apple servers will be updated with the unlock request. One point I forgot to mentioned is that my phone was jailbroken earlier. Will that make any difference? After a clean restore I see both the Version & Modem Firmware updated to latest.

Also, I did not have a choice other than to restore with latest iOS. Even after clicking 'Update' from itunes, it starts downloading the iOS6 which takes hours on slow internet connections. So I downloaded the iOS 6 ipsw separately and did a shift+restore. Before this I tried with iOS 4 & 5 but it didnt work (may be apple stopped signing the old OSes for restores).

I will surely call the AT&T CS but what if they say they have sent the request to Apple & everything done from their side?

[porkman77]

I'm having exactly the same issue... did you ever resolve it? I even went all the way to the applestore who said it's in AT&Ts hands as their system shows the iphone has been unlocked on the apple side.

If it ends up being a hardware issue the only option is to call apple care but since it's out of warranty not sure what they can do....

[Katrrod]

I had this same thing happen.... I updeted my iphone software while doing my authorized unlock. I put in the tmobile sim and it didn't work. read these posts, then I called att again and told them what I thought was going on and asked them to just re-do the unlock request. They obliged and  when I  followed the instructions again (without doing an upgrade) everything worked fine.