Others have simple steps you can follow to unlock your phone, including special rules for deployed military personnel. Many carriers now sell phones advertised as unlocked. How To Unlock Your Phone on the Major Wireless Carriers If your call successfully connects, then your phone is unlocked and should work with other SIM cards. Here are the phone numbers for some well-known wireless carriers:Īnother way to determine whether your phone is unlocked is by inserting a SIM card from another carrier and seeing if you can make a call. Contact Your CarrierĬall the customer service number of your carrier to ask whether your phone is unlocked. This method works a lot of the time but is not always 100% accurate. If multiple carrier names show up, your phone might be unlocked. But in general, you can go to Settings > Connections > Mobile Networks > Network Operators and tap Search Now to see if the names of other carriers come up. There are a lot of different Android phones out there, so there are many different Settings configurations. While this method is the easiest, it’s not foolproof. If you see Cellular Data Network, then your phone is probably unlocked. To tell if your iPhone is unlocked, go to Settings > Cellular > Cellular Data. Here are three ways you can tell if your phone is unlocked. On the other hand, if you paid for your smartphone upfront, it might be unlocked, but that’s not always the case. If you bought your phone from your carrier and continue to make monthly payments on it, it’s likely locked into the network that sold you the device. How Can I Tell if I Have an Unlocked Phone? If you’re still under contract and paying monthly for your phone, the service provider “locks” the phone into its network so that it won’t work on any other carrier’s service. What Is an Unlocked Phone?Īn unlocked phone is one in which the operation of the device is not contractually bound to a carrier such as AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. Unlock Your Phone on These Major Carriersįirst, let’s start with some basics about your mobile phone and what it means to unlock it. I personally went through the process to unlock my phone with T-Mobile, but these simple steps should also work if you have a phone you bought from AT&T or Verizon. And if it’s not, I’ll show you how to unlock it. In this article, I’ll show you how to tell whether your iPhone or Android phone is unlocked. The good news is that there are some simple ways to find out. Are you buying or selling a phone? In either case, one of the most important things you’ll need to know is whether the device is unlocked or not.

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