iPhone 4S Pre-Paid Questions

[britboyj]

Hi all -

My contact is up June 21st and since AT&T determines unlocks by contract and by device, my 4S is eligible for unlock then. (Bought with my mother's account and then we swapped sims/phones)

I was going to take it to Virgin Mobile, but apparently cannot due to the CDMA antenna being disabled in the phones carried by GSM providers, so I was thinking of taking it to AT&T's prepaid.

Couple of questions:

1. Do they officially support this?
2. Can I get data under their "unlimited data" plan? The rep said I could, but they're… well, you know.
3. If I get data via them, can I use built-in tethering with it, or is there a PAYG tether option?
4. DOES VISUAL VOICEMAIL WORK!?

Thanks in advance!

 

[jalagl]

I can talk about my experience with AT&T pay as you go with my iPhone.
In order to use the data plans on a smartphone, you need to enroll in the monthly options:

$25 Monthly Plan (250min, unlimited SMS)
$50 Monthly Unlimited Plan

And purchase one of the data plans:

Data 50MB $5.00
Data 200MB $15.00
Data 1GB $25.00

For the iPhone, just set it up with the correct profile from http://unlockit.co.nz and it works perfectly. I don't know if they support it, but it works.

I haven't seen any option to have unlimited data. on the $50 plan you can have unlimited data with a "dumbphone", but for smartphones they explicitly prohibit it. From their webpage:

1Monthly Unlimited plan requires an eligible phone. Smartphone users must purchase a data package to use data on Monthly Unlimited Plan. Pay-per-use data is not available on Smartphones.
2Smartphones require a data package to use data/web services with any eligible plan on the AT&T network. Pay-per-use data is not available on Smartphones.

Before you could use the data plans on their $0.10/min or $2/day prepaid plans, but now you have to use the monthly options. Data is not available for smartphones in any form with the per-minute/per-day plans - I had an argument with a guy on the AT&T store last week about it.

I am not sure about tethering, never tried it.
I don't think Visual Voice Mail works, in the features it says:

Included Features
Basic Voice Mail*
Caller ID
Call Forwarding*

This changed recently, I think starting in May. Before I used the $2/day plan and purchased the 50MB plan when visiting the US (normally 1 or 2 weeks per month, on business). Now it is not an option, and I'm not going to pay $25 for a week, as it will likely have expired for my next visit... so I'm stuck without data. I am currently waiting for my balance to run out to change to another carrier.

Hope this helps.