While unlocking the iPhone isn't supported, it can be done. There are no other options in South America for the iPhone though so unlocking would be your only way to get a local account on an iPhone. I hear a number of gray market companies offer unlocked iPhones but I have no experience in that area.

The following article I saved off some user forum, should be helpful, although I dont remember where it was from. I have also given the link for a video which should be very helpful. Good luck!

International Roaming iPhone Bill
~Anders Brownworth - Thursday, September 13, 2007 2:20 PM

I took my iPhone on a trip to Chile and Argentina. As it is a quad-band (world) phone, I was interested to see how it worked on networks outside the United States. In the US, the iPhone always says "AT&T" in the upper left hand corner of the screen as that is your only network option. But with multiple foreign networks to choose from, how was the iPhone going to handle this?

Just about everything worked including the EDGE network for Internet access, SMS, Visual Voicemail and with International Assist on (the default), I could dial my contacts in the US just by picking a contact without having to edit the number. The one drawback was that I never got any Caller ID on incoming calls. I would just see "Blocked" for all incoming calls. All in all though, it was a fairly small price to pay for my iPhone to work in Argentina. It was a good bet that mine was the only iPhone in Cordoba at the time!

While network selection is "Automatic" by default, you can pick the network you want to use by hand. Below is a video of this in action. I happened to be in Cordoba, Argentina at the time so my options were movistar, Argentina Telecom Personal and CTI Movil Argentina. It takes a bit of time for the network search to finish but eventually you get a list of carriers that you can use. In "Automatic" mode, the carriers that AT&T has contracts with (CTI Movil, Unifon and Telecom Personal in the case of Argentina) will be automatically selected. If you manually pick one and go out of that network's range or pick an unsupported carrier, calls predictably will fail. Obviously the best choice was to leave the phone in automatic select mode. The phone also worked well in Santiago, Chile, although of course on other networks.

On a side note, I was told that the street price of my iPhone was in the neighborhood of $2,500 given the price disparity of other smartphones (Treo 700) that you can purchase both in the US and in Argentina! Electronics are heavily taxed in Argentina.

I didn't activate International Roaming until several days into the trip. I had to go through a credit check before they would add it though. Thankfully I could call into the AT&T 800 number with Skype to get that done when I was in South America.

Phone calls don't go through WiFi so I would be charged for those in or outside the USA. I did use the Internet features via WiFi though and they worked well without a charge.

Over a month after returning from my trip, I finally got my bill from AT&T for iPhone voice and data service. I was happy with my iPhone as an International phone but of course I was waiting to see what the bill would look like when all was said and done. Well, at long last, here is my iPhone bill including International Roaming charges.

I left for the trip on July 31, 2007 and when the iPhone was not authorized for International Roaming. I was able to use the WiFi feature for Internet access but of course all outgoing calls failed. People calling my number from the States went directly to voicemail as if my phone was off.

I called AT&T's 800 number with my Belkin WiFi Skype Phone and got them to turn on International Roaming for my iPhone. It was activated as of roughly 6:00pm on August 4, 2007, 5 days into the trip. I got several incoming calls and seem to remember that I placed at least a few more than the one outgoing call listed on the bill. (I'm not complaining!) I was charged the standard highway-robbery rates of $.50 per SMS, $.0195 per KB for data and $2.29 per minute for voice calls per AT&T's International Roaming Rates. I returned to the States on August 9, 2007 where you can see domestic data charges resuming.

While the bill was largely what I expected, several items did pop out. The total for what amounted to 5 days of light International use was $148.77. Of that, $98.39 was for data which was a much higher number than I expected. I attribute this mostly to the fact that iPhone data plans in the U.S. are unmetered ($20 per month gives you all you can eat) so the iPhone makes liberal use of the EDGE network. There is no way that I could find to stop the iPhone from using the EDGE network short of going into Airplane mode which means no voice service either. At $.0195 per KB Internationally, the numbers can quickly spiral out of control. Just checking my email several times and looking at a web page or two ran me into a charge that was quite a bit more than I would consider "reasonable". These have to be some of the most expensive bits I've ever purchased!

I knew what the charges were going in, but I wish there was some way to switch off the EDGE network. While I was generally around a WiFi access point which the phone would opt for if it was in range, had I set my email to check every 15 minutes and gone away from that access point, I would be looking at a far higher bill. I think AT&T and Apple are going to see some very unhappy customers because of high data charges stemming from the fact that you can't selectively turn off EDGE access. I'd guess we'll see a lawsuit on this one in the future.

UPDATE: Apple has since added the ability to switch off "Data Roaming" for International travelers. See Settings -> General -> Network -> Data Roaming.
Source(s):
http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/international-roami...

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