Sim not working with a new phone in foreign country

[AndyyyHHH]

Hi, I’ve been using iPhone 12 with the telus sim I have. I am currently in Korea for a month now and just got a new iPhone 15 pro. When I got to Korea I got a Korean pre paid Sim that just works for data usage, I used to receive messages from my telus sim and used the data with my Korean pre paid sim. But somehow when I try to use my Telus sim on the new phone I got, It won’t catch any signal and won’t activate. I’ve tried turning my phone on and off several times inserting the sim but it won’t work. I really need my Canadian number back on this new phone for some purposes and my old phone is totally broken which used to work just fine with the telus sim. Any ideas?

[AndyyyHHH]

is it just the activation of the sim restricted in other countries outside of Canada? 

[TELUS_Support]

That could be tricky, if you got a new iPhone that's not from us...so options may be limited. We'd also need to access your account to see your roaming options. If you'd like, feel free to send us a private message and we can discuss further.

[Nighthawk]

Some countries also have restrictions for phones purchased in them. Some users on other websites have had issues getting foreign SIMs to work with phones purchased in South Korea. The foreign SIMs in some cases were not recognized at all in the phone bought in SK but worked fine in the old phone brought from home. You may need to check with the local carrier in SK to see if there's anything they can do or if there are restrictions on their end.

Additionally, the phone itself won't be in Telus's database either. If it was in Canada, it likely wouldn't be much of an issue but overseas it's hard to say. 

[TELUS_Support]

You may also want to try manually selecting a network to see if that may help.

• Go to Settings > Cellular > Cellular Data Options > Network Selection

[Syaoran]

Telus will block non-Telus purchased devices from doing if the network sees them as a grey market device.  I haven't heard of that happening with US purchased iPhone's but it does happen a lot with non-Canadian Android models.  Perhaps this also includes iPhone model from Korea.