When I was in Australia in November I bought a prepaid SIM card
to avoid expensive roaming charges, only to find out that my stupid
phone was locked and couldn't be used with foreign SIM cards.
I called my cell phone provider (Fido) to complain; the phone was
relatively new so I could understand it being locked, but I thought
they should unlock for me it since I had been with them for 5+ years,
and already given them thousands of dollars in service fees. They
said their policy is that they'll unlock it for $200, and it
doesn't matter how long I have been with them.
I found a few places in Australia that would unlock it for $25,
but I decided not to bother since my phone didn't have signal
everywhere there anyway. (it's triband, but not the right three
bands apparently)
I was planning to call Fido and yell at them some more when I got
home, and threaten to cancel my service if they didn't unlock my
phone, but after checking around online to make sure I could get
it unlocked myself, I found that you can just download (Windows)
software [1] to calculate the unlock codes yourself, or pay $2 to
generate the codes online. [2]
So I paid $2 for the code for my phone and unlocked it myself;
worked fine, and took about 2 minutes. I should have looked into
that in Australia.
[1]
http://unlock.nokiafree.org/download.php
http://wiki.ehow.com/Unlock-Your-Nokia-Cell-Phone
[2]
http://www.uniquephones.com/
--
Gerald Oskoboiny <
[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/