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Been on the phone twice with AT&T. The first time was from my old iPhone 4. While they were "activating" my 5, the call was disconnected and the iPhone 4 had no service. My iPhone 5 has BEEN showing bars, AT&T, and 4G all morning since I set the phone up, but it actually has no service. Made a second call to AT&T from Skype, since I have no actual phone service, and they had to follow up with an activation on the SIM. Now they tell me I need to wait another 2 hours.

What a nightmare. Hoping this gets straightened out soon. Otherwise I'm happy with the phone - no quality issues with screen or scratches/dents etc. that some are reporting.
 
After calling from a landline and some confusion regarding datashare (which was apparently the issue), both phones are activated. I didn't mean to activate my spouses, because he is now out of the house with no phone, but the ATT rep accidentally did the wrong one first. Oops! :D
 
AT&T's system is giving her an error over the phone...30 minutes on the phone and counting. So far I've gotten 78 "Just one moment"s....
 
Im on the phone with att too, same prob as morphineseason. Talked to two reps already and been on the phone for 40 mins...
 
Call to AT&T problem solved

Hi, I have been getting the same thing all day. Rebooted, synched with iTunes, removed & reinstalled SIM card. Could NOT make or receive calls. Oddly, old iPhone 3 still fully functional. (tried turning off, and removing SIM - no fix).
Finally after a few calls to 611 on old iPhone, got the "technical difficulties" message a few times. Last time held on for a live support person. To my surprise, the wait was under a minute.
The problem ended up being: The SIM card number was never entered to correlate with the iPhone 5.
Had to give the IMEI (settings/general/about). And THEN, the tricky part, removing the SIM on the new iPhone 5 - find a magnifying glass, and read her the 20 digit number.
Reinserted, 1 minute later got a text, and a DIAL TONE!
:)
Thank-you Laverne Williams at AT&T, who actually had a clue!
 
Finally got mine to work as well. After 3 calls and one live help chat it managed to do the trick!
 
Hi, I have been getting the same thing all day. Rebooted, synched with iTunes, removed & reinstalled SIM card. Could NOT make or receive calls. Oddly, old iPhone 3 still fully functional. (tried turning off, and removing SIM - no fix).
Finally after a few calls to 611 on old iPhone, got the "technical difficulties" message a few times. Last time held on for a live support person. To my surprise, the wait was under a minute.
The problem ended up being: The SIM card number was never entered to correlate with the iPhone 5.
Had to give the IMEI (settings/general/about). And THEN, the tricky part, removing the SIM on the new iPhone 5 - find a magnifying glass, and read her the 20 digit number.
Reinserted, 1 minute later got a text, and a DIAL TONE!
:)
Thank-you Laverne Williams at AT&T, who actually had a clue!

Had the same problem all day. Did this, but still no data. They're telling me it's defective. :(

Been on the phone twice with AT&T. The first time was from my old iPhone 4. While they were "activating" my 5, the call was disconnected and the iPhone 4 had no service. My iPhone 5 has BEEN showing bars, AT&T, and 4G all morning since I set the phone up, but it actually has no service. Made a second call to AT&T from Skype, since I have no actual phone service, and they had to follow up with an activation on the SIM. Now they tell me I need to wait another 2 hours.

What a nightmare. Hoping this gets straightened out soon. Otherwise I'm happy with the phone - no quality issues with screen or scratches/dents etc. that some are reporting.

Same deal here. All day long. Finally getting voice and text, but no data...
 
Activate issue

I had the same issue, I was lucky to be near an ATT store. We did all that everyone suggested here to no avail, so he replaced the sim card with a new one and it fixed my activation issue.
 
1 of 2 new of my iPhone 5's did not activate. Didn't notice it until now. Tried the web form, and the IVR but it didn't work. Waiting for a AT&T rep now. This upgrade has not gone well... :(
 
Been on the phone twice with AT&T. The first time was from my old iPhone 4. While they were "activating" my 5, the call was disconnected and the iPhone 4 had no service. My iPhone 5 has BEEN showing bars, AT&T, and 4G all morning since I set the phone up, but it actually has no service. Made a second call to AT&T from Skype, since I have no actual phone service, and they had to follow up with an activation on the SIM. Now they tell me I need to wait another 2 hours.

What a nightmare. Hoping this gets straightened out soon. Otherwise I'm happy with the phone - no quality issues with screen or scratches/dents etc. that some are reporting.

Did you end up getting it activated? This is exactly what happened to me this morning.
 
AT&T was just able to activate mine. There was some "checkbox" that needed to be checked, lol!
 
Did you end up getting it activated? This is exactly what happened to me this morning.

Nope. 4 or 5 calls into AT&T (with 20 minute+ wait times each time) and they were not able to help me. My last two calls to them ended with them telling me to "wait 24 hours because their having issues with a switch". They said my SIM and IMEI numbers were provisioned correctly. This is absolutely driving me INSANE.
 
Nope. 4 or 5 calls into AT&T (with 20 minute+ wait times each time) and they were not able to help me. My last two calls to them ended with them telling me to "wait 24 hours because their having issues with a switch". They said my SIM and IMEI numbers were provisioned correctly. This is absolutely driving me INSANE.

Got a little further now. I went in to Settings-General-Reset and did an "Erase All Content and Settings" and then went through the iPhone setup again, which looks like it included another activation, and now I have voice and text. Still no data. Will keep trying some other stuff, but some others are reporting missing data, so this might be an AT&T thing.
 
Half hour in and LTE still not up. I've got voice and text. Come on AT&T this is ridiculous!!! Every single year!

You might be having the same problem I am, did you restore an old iCloud/iTunes backup from a phone that at some point was Jailbroken and may have at one time had a comcenter hack or custom APN installed? (my working theory)

If so, the immediate fix is to erase everything (or iTunes "RESTORE") without restoring the backup.... still working on other solutions at the moment but not having any luck.
 
Got a little further now. I went in to Settings-General-Reset and did an "Erase All Content and Settings" and then went through the iPhone setup again, which looks like it included another activation, and now I have voice and text. Still no data. Will keep trying some other stuff, but some others are reporting missing data, so this might be an AT&T thing.

Still without data today. Just keep getting the same error: "Could not activate cellular data network. You are not subscribed to a cellular data service."

Talked with AT&T again. They walked me through the same stuff I've tried a million times. They transferred me to Apple - apple did the same, then put a level two AT&T person on the line. They now think its my SIM card and I have to wait until Monday for it since there's no mail tomorrow. If that doesn't work, I'm supposed to call the guy at Apple for a replacement phone (another day of waiting) - not sure why they didn't just kill two birds and send me a new phone/sim card together.

I had to pull teeth with the AT&T person just to get them to overnight the SIM card - they kept insisting that 3-5 days was the best they could do. Since the nearest AT&T store is 59 miles from me I said that was unacceptable and that there's no reason they shouldn't be able to overnight it. They eventually gave in.

This is honestly the worst experience I've had with Apple and AT&T in the last 3 years. Very disappointed.
 
Try to restore without restoring from backup. That's what I had to do.

That's what I've been doing the whole time, unfortunately. Tried a restore through iTunes and still no go. iTunes never actually says it's activating when I set it up through iTunes. When I do it OTA it always says activating. I still think it's a software issue in iOS 6, but who knows. I just hope the SIM card replacement fixes it once and for all.
 
Try to restore without restoring from backup. That's what I had to do.

I was able to resolve the problem without having to do a full erase/restore. I contacted technical support chat via the wireless.att.com website, and got a surprisingly helpful rep. She said that for me, the problem was related to the mobile share plan's data provisioning. She said the billing dept. needed to add LTE to the list of services for my line, but was helpful enough to make that call for me while I stood by in the chat session. It took a couple attempts, but she was able to coordinate with the billing department to add the correct provisions to grant me LTE access.

On a side note, part of my problem was likely the caused by the sim/imei being activated on my line as part of a cross-activation upgrade (wherein I stole an upgrade for a secondary line on my account).

Good luck, everybody!
 
Got the new SIM card from FedEx today and popped it in. Had to call AT&T because I was getting "No Service". They had me power off the phone and did some activation on their end, and now all is working!

Guess my original SIM card was bad. Luck of the draw I suppose - and since the nano sim is a new thing, maybe there are some manufacturing issues with it. Just glad I can finally start enjoying this phone like everyone else.
 
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