iPhone 5 won't activate

KiltedTim wrote:

You don't activate it. It is obsolete. it is no longer supported. You can't even get apps that will run on it any more with very few exceptions.

At some point, Apple changed things so that you didn't need a SIM to set up an iPhone as a sort of iPod touch, provided that you could make a Wi-Fi Internet connection. But with the early iPhones, you needed to be able to activate with a carrier to get the phone to do anything at all.

That requires support from the carriers that, in the U.S., does not exist any more.

Recycle it.

That message means the iPhone cannot reach Apple’s activation servers, and the phone is falling back to the older iTunes‑based activation method. On an iPhone 5, this usually happens when the device cannot register on a supported cellular network and the activation server refuses the request. Even though the phone is on Wi‑Fi, the iPhone 5 still requires a valid, readable SIM and a working baseband connection to complete activation. When the phone shows No Service, the activation server sees it as unable to authenticate and returns the “temporarily unavailable” error.

Connecting the phone to a computer with iTunes or Finder can sometimes complete activation because the computer sends the activation request on the phone’s behalf. If the phone still shows No Service after that, activation will continue to fail because the iPhone 5 cannot validate the SIM or connect to a supported carrier network. Many carriers no longer support activation for older devices, and the iPhone 5 depends on network technologies that have been shut down in many regions.

If the SIM is active and the phone still shows No Service, the baseband hardware may not be responding, and when the baseband cannot initialize, the phone cannot activate under any method. A restore through Recovery Mode can reload the activation components, but if the baseband remains offline, the activation server will continue to reject the request.

Axel F.

I don't know if any SIM cards still work on the iPhone 5 in the U.S.

U.S. carriers have completely, or almost completely, shut down their 2G and 3G networks. Those account for most of the frequency bands that the iPhone 5 supports.

While the iPhone 5 has limited support for LTE (4G), it looks like this is for data only. It appears that the iPhone 5 does not support VoLTE (Voice over LTE), and can thus only place regular cellular calls over 2G and 3G networks. That is, to say, the networks that have been shut down.

brantley56 wrote:

what SIM cards still work on the iPhone 5 in the usa

Effectively none...

I understand T-Mobile actually still has some 3g service in a few rural areas, but that's it...

All US carriers now require devices capable of Voice Over LTE. That means a minimum of an iPhone 6.

The iPhone 5 is no longer usable as a phone in most of the world these days.

This is a long shot but easy enough to try. Make sure the date and time are correct. Years ago when I found my old iPhone 3G in a box and powered it up, it worked but could not connect to any web sites or the App Store. Its date was set to January 1 2000 or something like that. A wildly incorrect date breaks SSL certificate validation, among other things. Fixing the date and time made things work again.

That being said, you're not going to get much use out of an iPhone that was discontinued almost 13 years ago.

You don't activate it. It is obsolete. it is no longer supported. You can't even get apps that will run on it any more with very few exceptions.

Recycle it.

Buying a SIM card won't help. You don't seem to understand that you will not be able to activate your iPhone because it is obsolete.

Continuing to ask the same question will not result in a different answer.

Drop the phone off at the recycle center.

edclange wrote:

This is a long shot but easy enough to try. Make sure the date and time are correct. Years ago when I found my old iPhone 3G in a box and powered it up, it worked but could not connect to any web sites or the App Store. Its date was set to January 1 2000 or something like that. A wildly incorrect date breaks SSL certificate validation, among other things. Fixing the date and time made things work again.

...

Your phone was already activated if it showed a data and time.

The phone in question cannot activate.

brantley56 wrote:

i have an unactvaded sprint sim card would that work

Not sure why you think that would work... Sprint no longer exists. They were a CDMA carrier. That network no longer exists.

Give the poor old thing a decent burial.