Can not Unlock 4th Gen iPad from ATT

Malcolm,

While I appreciate your prompt reply, your answer about ipads not being locked appears to be at odds with my personal experience, and with some other information I have read and been told.

For example, the apple rep on the phone today, told me that her system shows that my iPad was locked on 6/15/2013, but it didn't show to which carrier it is locked.

Also, this is from a different thread on this forum:

(see: Network can lock iphones bought from Apple?? -- portions of it are quoted at the end of this message)

And while I confess that the thread is about an iPhone (and not an iPad), it seems to me that the imei for my iPad, purchased unlocked at an apple store, may have be updated in the apple database by the carrier or company that activated service for me to indicate that my imei was "locked" once I activated a data plan 6 months after purchase.

I did activate it at an independent store in NYC that offered service with several different carriers, and I moved my personal cell phone to AT&T, with a 2 year contract, and added my iPad for data access only using data from a shared "Family plan". Is it possible that this caused an activation request to be sent to apple indicating that my ipad's imei number was now locked?

When I have tried other sims (such as Cricket Mobile, or xfinity Mobile), I get messages about the iPad being locked to a particular carrier, and to contact the carrier about unlocking.

Because Cricket uses the AT&T network, I would assume that the Cricket sim should work.

I realize that xfinity uses the Verizon network, and their LTE implementations are different, so maybe the xfinity mobile sim won't work on LTE matter what.

I did find an apple support article stating that my ipad model 1459 only supports the following LTE bands:

Here's the excerpt from the iPhones thread I linked to earlier, which makes me suspect that *somehow* my

iPad's IMEI number must have gotten a "lock" record added to Apple's database, which is what is causing me problems now.

Lawrence FinchOct 19, 2016 6:48 AM in response to Ergates

Level 8 (46,853 points)

iPhone

Oct 19, 2016 6:48 AM Re: Network can lock iphones bought from Apple??in response to Ergates

The only phones that are sold completely unlocked from day of purchase are phones sold directly by Apple. There is no other source for truly unlocked phones. The lock status has nothing to do with the phone; the lock status of a phone is in its record in Apple's activation database. When you activate a phone iOS sends a query to the activation database and either locks the phone to a carrier or unlocks the phone based on the results. Before that query happens the phone is locked for all carriers.

When a carrier sells a phone that phone is always locked to the carrier that purchased it from Apple. That is, when Apple ships a phone to Giffgaff for resale it is marked in the activation database as locked to Giffgaff. Giffgaff may chose to unlock it, but that is up to them, not Apple.

There is a third process for non-carrier dealers that resell iPhones, such as Carphone Warehouse in the UK or Best Buy in the US. These phones are region locked initially, but they lock automatically to the first carrier they are activated with. So a Carphone Warehouse phone will activate with any UK carrier, but will become locked to that carrier as soon as a SIM is inserted. It will not work with a carrier outside of the UK, however.

For a carrier-locked phone if the carrier agrees to unlock it they send a request to Apple to change the lock status in the activation database to "unlocked." This usually takes a couple of days to process. Once it has been unlocked a new activation is required by the phone. This can be done either by restoring iOS using iTunes, or inserting a different SIM in the phone. Either will send a new request to the activation database.