QUOTE(skyther @ Oct 23 2010, 08:51 AM)
You can go on a contract with Optus as in international student, but in most cases the salesperson will have to call India to get an override approval for the credit check.
They are, however, extremely strict on the minimum criteria for international students. The expiry date of your student visa must be after the expiry date of your contract. Sometimes they require an additional 2 months, so if your contract duration is 24 months, as a rule of thumb they require your visa to be valid for 26 months. If you are currently doing pre-U and plan on going to Uni after but only have a visa valid for a year, you can forget about it. They will also require proof of income/allowance from parents, bank statements, etc. In some cases they may also limit you to plans that are below a certain value, say $49, which makes it rather difficult to obtain high value phones on instalment. There is a ton of ID that you need to bring, best to check with the store beforehand.
Any iPhone issued by a carrier will be sim locked, including contract units purchased from Apple. The only unlocked iPhones are those purchased outright (ie. prepaid units) from Apple.
Carriers can unlock the phone for you, I don't know what the charges are but last I heard
Telstra unlock fees were pretty expensive. Sometimes it takes several weeks,
usually it's done in a few days. The carrier needs to put a request through to Apple to update the registry so that your phone is unlocked. After that, you need to restore your phone so iTunes can unlock it.
let me add a few more information:
telstra's unlocking fee is AUD150 (however if you are an existing telstra customer with other telstra products, for example broadband, landline, tv et cetera, telstra may at its discretion waive the unlocking fee for you)
i'm pleased to say that the unlocking processes for most major networks are almost instantaneous.
hence even if you haven't receive the confirmation text message, you can actually proceed to restore your iPhone via iTunes after two business days.
This post has been edited by nokia2003: Oct 23 2010, 03:50 PM