Carrier What is the phone number for on activated iPad Air LTE?

It's just a way that carriers bill you.

Not sure exactly what your asking. But you cannot use it for voice purposes... only data.

iJeremy said:

So I just activated the cellular data on my iPad Air and saw that the iPad was assigned its own phone number. Do I need that number for anything?

Thanks for any help!

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It also allowed for text messaging in addition to billing. My Aircard has a phone # attached which gets texts.

jlc1978 said:

It also allowed for text messaging in addition to billing. My Aircard has a phone # attached which gets texts.

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Some carriers allow messaging, some may not. My carrier provides routine status updates on my data line, and as the iPad has no way of presenting these to me, I only receive them if the SIM card is in another device such as a USB modem or MiFi.

Back before T-Mobile became an official iPhone/iPad carrier. I used a data only sim with a Nexus 7/iPad Mini. To setup an online account, they sent a temporary pin to the device to verify the device. Since an iPad can't get these since they are basically text messages, I had to slip it into the Nexus 7 since they can receive those types of messages.

Of course now, setting up a T-Mobile account for a data plan does not require this.

SMS's primary function was to deliver messages to the device from the carrier.

Carriers then got smart and decided to sell them at 10 cents a pop.