So finally AT&T realized that they should do something about locked iPhones on their network without the interference of Tim Cook. AT&T will unlock all off contract iPhones which were purchased on a 2 year contract basis starting from April 8th. Remember that this service would only be available for people who have iPhones which were originally purchased from AT&T and their contracts are over now.
AT&T issued a statement to MacRumors in which they mentioned some terms and conditions of this offer which is scheduled to start from April 8th.
Beginning Sunday, April 8, we will offer qualifying customers the ability to unlock their AT&TiPhones. The only requirements are that a customer’s account must be in good standing, their device cannot be associated with a current and active term commitment on an AT&T customer account, and they need to have fulfilled their contract term, upgraded under one of our upgradepolicies or paid an early termination fee.
If you have an iPhone which is originally locked to AT&T and you fulfill all requirement then there’s not stopping for you, you can simple contact AT&T after April 8th and get your iPhones unlocked. If you own an iPhone which was purchased by someone else then you can face some problems during the process because there’s no guarantee whether original iPhone owner has cleared all his payments with AT&T or not.
We reported twice in last two months that AT&T unlocked their customer’s iPhone direct orders from Apple’s CEO office. This could be one the reasons why AT&T is offering this service after a LONG time.
This is good news for some people but there’s another side to this story as well. AT&T never unlocked their iPhones in the past which forced people to look for other ways to unlock their iPhones and use them on carrier other than AT&T. These “other” ways included infamous UltraSn0w unlock and hardware unlocks like Gevey SIM. Now that people CAN get their iPhones unlocked from AT&T, there’s a great chance that dev teams who used to work on unlocks would change their priorities because America is a huge market for unlocks. But it would be too early to discuss the future of software unlocking.
Source how to Arena
