Hey everybody!

I have an iPhone 4 on a 2 year contract with o2 which terminates around June 2012. It's looking possible that I will be moving to NYC in about 8 weeks time and I would like to have a similar contract out there on the new iPhone 5 which will probably be coming out in the next couple of weeks.

What options do I have? Is there a way I can migrate to AT&T / Sprint / T-Mobile or will I need to outright cancel my current o2 contract and pay some kind of huge cancellation fee and then take out a brand new contract in the US?

Thanks in advance for any knowledge or useful links to solve this conundrum!

Leo

O2 don't exist here, so you'd have to start afresh. If you want to carry on using your iPhone you'll need to get it unlocked, which O2 ought to do for free, and a US SIM. It will only work on AT&T and T-Mobile here.

In my case I had to get an AT&T PAYG SIM ($2 for unlimited calls and texts each day you use it) and cut it to the microSIM size with a SIM cutter, and install an AT&T data profile with the Apple iPhone Configuration Utility. This isn't as difficult as it sounds - there are lots of howtos on the Web. I then buy a $25 500MB data bundle each month, and everything just works except for visual voicemail.

I sold my iphone on Ebay last Sunday, put it on a BIN for £350 and it sold within 5 minutes! Knew I should have put it up for more! lol But I only had a 12mth contract which runs out in 3 months and only costs me £22 a month. I had it officially unlocked which cost £20.

I am going to buy an iphone 5 when it comes out. Although the costs of the tariffs is slightly off putting

Vicki

Okie doke, so it looks like the sale of the iPhone will help
cover the remaining months on the uk contract.

Cool. Thanks folks!

I know I will get a hard time for this....Since I always do, but here goes.....

If your leaving the UK for good then just don't pay it.

I'm not necessarily leaving for good - I still have family & friends here - I'll visit a couple of times a year and maybe move back in a couple of years (and then back to the US after another couple of years etc). But thanks for the cheeky suggestion which, yes, I'm sure you'll get a little heat for

Lol.

Why not let O2 unlock your iPhone and just get a SIM, possibly prepaid, to use in the same phone while state-side, if you're planning to pop back and forth for a while?

AT&T will most likely still insist on a contract with the exact same terms as if you had bought an iPhone off them (I tried last year) and PAYG with data isn't necessarily an option with them because of this issue.

T-Mobile is probably going to be happy to have your business, just be aware that one of the frequencies they use for 3G is different to everybody else so chances are the iPhone won't work with 3G (but it'll work fine otherwise).

As I posted earlier, it is possible to get data on an unlocked iPhone on AT&T PAYG, so long as you don't mind getting a bit techie with it.

You do want to check site coverage though, as they're rather flakey where I am....but then again, so is T-Mobile

That is not completely true. You can jailbreak your iPhone, easily, and it will work on any US carrier. I should say your iPhone 4. The new iPhone 4S will require a contract unless you buy from eBay or some other source.

Yes, you can jailbreak your iPhone. I know I did. But the newer your phone is, the more complex the process is, and with some methods you'll even lose some functionality like GPS. If you _can_ get your iPhone unlocked without going the jailbreak route, that's much preferable than hacking around with it.

There are other PAYG providers also, MVNOs such as H2O wireless with plans better than AT&T, whose bandwidth they rent.

Completely iPhone compatible, even locked AT&T iPhones have been reported to work on this network (phones previously locked to other networks will need to be unlocked.).

Apple sell iPhones without any carrier locks on them now, although there is a premium price for that.