Last night my wife and I switched to Cingular and we both had our voice coverage working but couldn’t get our data to work. My wife, not being a geek like me, didn’t really care but I did of course, especially since I have a Treo 650.
I called Cingular this morning. I was really surprised that they answered very quickly – no wait. I talked to a nice rep named Varek and he did his best, walking me through checking all the network settings and making sure that there was GPRS coverage by my house, but he couldn’t solve the problem.
So then I stopped in a Cingular store in Pleasanton and the guy there was sure that he had found the problem – they had given me a Gemplus SIM card, which is incompatible with the Treo 650 (see this story). He swapped the Gemplus SIM card for an Axalto SIM card, but that didn’t work either. He suggested that I call tech support and try to replace the device.
So then I tried a second Cingular store in Saratoga. Again, the rep tried a different SIM card – another Axalto but with a different serial number or something – but this didn’t work either. And then she noticed that my account was simultaneously signed up for both unlimited MEdia Net and a pay-per-kilobyte plan. So she moved the pay-per-kilobyte plan over to my wife’s phone and then my wife’s data access started working, but mine was still hosed.
Finally, she noticed that the guy who activated the phone had made a mistake and had added unlimited MEdia Net but had not specified the activation date correctly – so she set the activation date to today and voila – it started working! Quite a long process to get this sucker working, but I have to admit that all the Cingular people that I dealt with were friendly and tried to help.