When you buy a subsidized iPhone directly from a network or retail outlet it will be IMEI locked, meaning it can only be used with one carrier. Carriers make an awful lot of money from customers they manage to lock into a contract, and in order to make these contracts appear more attractive, they provide sweeteners as an incentive (by way of a free or very cheap iPhone) to sign on the line. When it comes to the Apple iPhone, in order to entice their potential customers to sign up for lengthy contracts with them, the big cellular providers virtually give them away! In some cases, purchasing a factory unlocked iPhone directly from Apple will cost five times more than a carrier locked model of the same specification.

But say you wanted to use your iPhone on a different network as you have moved to a new area and your original carrier’s coverage is bad? The good news is there options available to unlock your iPhone so it can be used on any GSM network, anywhere in the world.

Pre 2011 there were two methods available to unlock an iPhone. However in July of that year Apple patched the hole in the iPhones iOS that had enabled a software unlock to function. It used to be possible to unlock an iPhone by installing software on the phone, but Apple closed the loop hole that enabled this to happen, and the only method that can be used to unlock an iPhone now is a iPhone factory unlock .
Until about three years ago an iPhone could be software unlocked and used on any network. But in order to software unlock a handset, it first had to be jailbroken. Jailbreaking is a hacking process which, once achieved, allows the installation of software on to an iPhone that has not been approved by Apple. It is important to understand that a software unlock only works on a few iPhone models - the iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s - and that they could not be running above iOS 5.1.1.

The second method of unlockin