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during my travels in hong kong, i had access to a locked american iphone 3gs, but i needed to unlock it to use it. to unlock it, i had jailbroken it using redsn0w and upgraded the baseband to 06.15.00 on ios 4.2.1. the baseband upgrade itself is a clever hack to flash it using the ipad baseband onto a locked 3g or 3gs device to give it the capability to be carrier unlocked.

before i upgraded the baseband there were many disclaimers mentioning that there was no way to come down the unlock and that you wouldn't be able to restore to stock firmwares anymore. knowing this, i went for it anyway since i was really hungering for some moblie broadband access in hong kong as well as the option of calling in cases of emergency.

so i unlocked it and downloaded ultrasn0w through the cydia package manager. i bought a one2free mobile broadband sim card for a week's unlimited access of internet. once connected i noticed that the tethering option was active so in addition of having 3g data access through the iphone, i was able to use it with my macbook pro as well.

one2free is labeled as csl on the iphone screen, and offered great reception everywhere. i was pleasantly surprised that there's full coverage on subways, but coverage all over hk was wonderful. from kowloon to the main island and surrounding small islands. it's a far cry from the not always reliable coverage from at&t all over los angeles.

note: there is a caveat to upgrading baseband and unlocking your iphone 3gs which will be addressed in the next blog post. it is still a tethered boot, and in trying to upgrade/restore the phone (or maybe even crashing/rebooting the device), may render the device in the dreaded "recovery loop," which means it stays stuck on either the apple logo or the red/low battery screen.