Using an iphone with a pre-pay AT&T SIM
 

Hi,

Apologies if this is a silly question. I am based in the UK, so my knowledge of US cell providers isn't great. My family live in the US. I'm trying to find a used iphone for my daughter for Christmas. Currently, she has a pay-as-you-go AT&T SIM. I see that the majority of used Iphones seems to be locked on to AT&T. I know that certainly on my provider here (T-Mobile), I can put a pre-paid SIM from the same company in a contract phone, and it works.

I don't want to spend $200 on an iphone, only to find it doesn't work with her existing SIM. Plus, can you imagine how well that wouldn't go over on Christmas morning? A fate worse than death :)

My questions therefore are these :-

1.) If I buy a phone that is still locked to AT&T, will it work with an AT&T pre-paid SIM?

2.) If the phone is unlocked, will it work with the SIM?

3.) We generally buy her the $60 vouchers for her current phone, which get her unlimited calls/texts for a month. This avoids the horrors of a teenage-based phone bill weighing 50 pounds flying through the letterbox :)

Assuming the SIM works in the phone, I assume the $60 voucher wouldn't cover any data costs? Is there an AT&T voucher that allows unlimited data?

Thanks for any help,

Yes. An AT&T locked phone (iphone or not) or any unlocked phone will work with an AT&T prepaid sim.

didn't at&t go back and forth on that with the iphone? If you have an iphone on the AT&T network, they want you to have one of their iphone data plans.

To answer one of OPs questions, if it's unlocked, it will work on AT&Ts network (with an AT&T sim) or on T-Mobiles network in the USA (with a t-mo USA sim). However, if you use it on t-mobile in the USA, you should turn off 3g, since the iphone doesn't use t-mobile's USA 3G frequencies. It will work using GSM/Edge/etc just fine in that case. (That's what I do, but I don't have a data plan. I only use wifi for data.)

-David

The prepaid unlimited plans are voice and SMS only. Without a plan, data are billed at 1 cent per KB. There is a $75 per month unlimited voice and SMS plan that also includes 200MB bucket of data, or you can purchase 100MB buckets for $19.99 each time. There is no unlimited data plan any more.

right, he's using a workaround (another phone's IMEI#). That's what I thought.

Thanks pm!

-David