If his phone is on 4.0, why it is tethered? He just need to use Jailbreakme.com from safari and jailbreak it. He will then has an untethered jailbreak. All he needs to do then to install Ultrasn0w from Cydia to unlock his phone.
I'm in the same situation here man, my friend has an iPhone 3G 4.1, he want's to upgrade to 4.2.1 because the untethered jailbreak just came out, but he wants to know if the unlock is available and works, anyone know anything about this??