unlocking services are everywhere online. and they should cost NO MORE than 30$.

and yes, they seem absolutely murky and opaque: are they hackers who cracked the IMEI algorithm? are they insiders with the carriers, or manufacturers? can the carriers wise up and blacklist your phone?



either way, i've used this a few times for a few different phones to no ill effect. they all seemed to work exactly as promised. paypal or otherwise transfer ~20USD to email address with phone information. receive unlocking code and instruction in a few minutes to few hours. apply.... voila

i dont have any hesitation using them in the future.

if you want the ones i used, PM

Minor point to add, and Perche probably already knows since he lives part time in Italy. Italy's LTE networks are on bands 3, 7 and 20. TIM probably has the widest deployment and is on all 3 bands depending on where you are. Most IP6s will support those 3 bands, but the IP5 was a little more fragmented and many US GSM variants won't.

In any case, HSPA+ speeds (4G is what you'll see on your phone with a TIM SIM) are very good. Certainly fast enough to burn through whatever amount of prepaid data you bought. I had no problems using 2.5 gigs in 10 days when my apartment's DSL went down and I was using my phone to upload photos to Dropbox and such. I wouldn't personally go out of my way to get an LTE capable phone in Italy unless I needed the bandwidth for something specific and also was planning to buy a lot of data allowance.

You could also put AppleCare + on the phone, and should something happen to it where it was broken, then Apple would replace it for $49 (I think that's the price). The replacement phone would come unlocked at the store.

In the event that the phone where to become broken of course...

This phone arrived, shipping took about a week, it is pristine and works well. Thanks. Dave.

I've had good experiences with Woot. The only thing is that they won't generally do returns unless the item is defective.