fatvegan

Two days ago I changed from Virgin to Telstra. I thought it might be easy, but secretly suspected it wouldn't be. And it wasn't. The Virgin "loyalty" man basically threatened to release my number if I didn't stay with Virgin. I rang them to ask about unlocking the phone which in theory you can do if you pay the remaining cost of the phone. I paid the remaining cost of the phone. Then I got a new Telstra SIM card. The Telstra man suggested I put it in the phone and if it boots up happily then that means that the phone is already unlocked and I don't have to do anything. He said to call him after 24 hours. After 24 hours it wasn't working. I couldn't easily call him because I didn't have a working phone. And I already suspected that Telstra wasn't the problem.

I emailed Virgin and didn't get a reply. I eventually called them, and after about 10 minutes of waiting they kind of accused me of stealing it because they couldn't find any evidence of the phone in their system. They said that I was using a Nokia 1110 (my phone from 2 years ago) and paying $74.95/month for that. They weren't able to explain why I was paying the amount of the $70 iPhone plan plus $4.95/month iPhone repayments. For 2 years. Or how I was able to clock up several hundred megabytes of data usage on my old Nokia 1110 each month. They said that if I couldn't produce the proof of purchase, there was nothing I could do. They said I could go into a Virgin shop and they might charge me to unlock it.

The shop wouldn't unlock it either. However, they would sell me a Virgin prepaid SIM card which would work on the locked phone. And I could use that SIM card to buy a prepaid mobile data voucher which let me download ultrasn0w to unlock the phone. Partly, based on the nice Virgin fellow's advice.

The funny thing about it all is that Telstra would have given me a free iPhone 3GS on my current plan. I didn't want it because it didn't really need a new phone. As it turned out I almost did. Thanks to lovely iPhone hackers there's a tiny, tiny amount of tantalum that can stay in the ground.