I recently got a cheap iphone 3g from ebay.

It was jailbroken (ie hacked), but I found the seller hadn’t unlocked it.

Rather than send it back, I decided to try unlocking it myself.

The procedure was quite simple using the “ultrasn0w” application.

All was fine until a few weeks later, when I noticed that the wifi suddenly wasn’t working anymore… the settings all worked normally, but it just didn’t detect any nearby wifi hotspots.

A while later, I was about to start investigating this, when, I plugged it into a win7 PC, and just left it to “charge”. I didn’t ask it to do anything with itunes, but somehow, when I returned a few hours later, there was no phone signal, and itunes was complaining about the phone.

Grrr!

Since I had been reading about iphones and jailbreaking, I found this was a perfect chance to learn more.

I eventually found I would have to re-install the firmware on the iphone (it came with version 4.0.1, so I figured I’d try the latest IOS 4.2.1).

It was quite a learning curve just figuring out which software to use to install a “hacked” version of IOS (I eventually found myself using sn0wbreeze and redsn0w as the main tools).

After that, I eventually got the iphone booting ios 4.2.1 (as well at reverting back to 4.1 a few times), but I just couldn’t get the mobile phone component to actually work.

Looks like I’ve gone from iphone to ipod…

Since I know there really isn’t anything wrong with the “phone” part, I keep investigating, and find that it should be possible to “unlock” the phone again if I upgrade the baseband to v6.15.

Baseband? From what I can understand, the phones Baseband is like the BIOS (or operating instructions) that are independent of the phones main operating system… and version 6.15 is a copy that was used on ipads (which has a flaw that allows unlocking)…

But now I have a problem: I need to download the unlock software (Ultrasn0w) via the internet… but I have no wifi, and the 3G connection isn’t working because the phone section of the iphone isn’t working!

I find the solution at: http://forum.gsmhosting.com/vbb/f456/iphone-unlocker-baseband-6-15-no-wifi-mughalg-1154329/

This lets me install Ultrasn0w directly to the phone, and then run it to unlock the phone!

Now, after having spent days working on this phone, I’m now back to where I started: how do I fix the WiFi connection?