Working now - here's my story for others.
I finally got the iPhone working yesterday, after 42 hours of waiting - about 6 or 7 of those on the phone with AT&T or Apple. What follows is only my experience, and my speculation as to the causes. I can't PROVE any of this. All times are EST.
Friday, 6/29/07
6:19 PM - Bought iPhone at the local AT&T store after waiting in line for about 5 hours - GREAT experience in line and with the store personnel.
6:45 PM - Got home, and updated to 10.4.10 and iTunes 7.3
7:00 PM - Started the activation process in iTunes. I chose the iPhone $79 plan (i.e. 900 min. + iPhone data), asked to port my number from my Verizon acct., and tried to enter my credit pre-approval number from the AT&T store. iTunes would not take my pre-approval number, as it was 14 digits, not 9, 12, or 13. I ended up leaving the pre-approval field blank. iTunes ran through everything, then left me with the "Your activation requires more time to complete" screen.
7:13 PM - got two emails - one stating that the port would take around 24 hours to complete, but that i should be prepared to activate the iPhone before then. I quote, "Phone service is scheduled to be disconnected on your current phone at or after 7:13 PM EDT on June 30." The other email stated that iTunes was working on my activation, and that i would receive another email when it was done. I didn't know it at the time, but I would not receive another email for 42 hours.
10:00 PM - finished band practice and still no email - i called the number given on the original iTunes page (877-419-4500). They answered after one ring and said their servers were just having trouble with the high volume of activations and that it would take "up to 6 hours to activate." At this point, i started keeping up with this thread on Mac Forums. I left for my gf's house, hoping to have an email when i returned in the AM.
Saturday, 6/30/07
9:00 AM - Got home and checked email first thing - no activation email! So I started making phone calls - first to the number i called last night, which now had a 30 minute hold time before someone told me that it might take "up to 24 hours to activate." This was as much as i ever got out of this call center. My next approach was to call the iPhone Activation number from the other email (877-800-3701). I got disconnected 5 times before actually reaching a person around 10:00 AM. The guy on the phone seemed to be knowledgeable, and was more than courteous, so i had hope. He said that everything looked fine, but that he was having "technical trouble on his end" and needed to get his tech support guy to help him out. I stayed on hold for the next hour, with him checking in every 4 or 5 minutes to make sure that i was still there and to thank me for my patience. He said that he'd "elevated my request status twice" since we'd been on the phone. In the end, my cell phone dropped the call after about an hour and i never got a call back, even though the CS rep had specifically asked me for a call back number.
~11:00 AM - Having read more on the forums, I had started to guess what some possible issues with activation were, and which ones would affect my account - primarilly the port from Verizon and the lack of a credit pre-approval number. (My credit was fine, just the number was wrong.) So i put a call in to the porting support line (888-898-7685). This led me through a bunch of automated questions and answers, and ended by telling me that my phone was active! I knew better, as the little picture of earth was still staring out at me! I put in another call to 877-800-3701, and this time asked for them to verify all the info on my account (after sitting on hold for a while, of course). The rep seemed to find a problem with my plan, and transferred me over to a customer service line (800-331-0500). Here, they found that i didn't have a data plan selected! (I had only ever selected the $79 iPhone plan in itunes!) Somehow among the servers, my plan had become a simple voice only plan, and that would be holding up my activation. With this problem fixed, the rep wanted to confim that the phone was active on AT&T's end, so we went over the SIM and ICCID numbers. These were NOT active, we found out - it seems that at least some of the iPhones shipped with SIMs that were never activated in the AT&T system. I suspect that this is why some people have had success with swapping SIMs and getting the phone to work. After a bit longer on hold and a transfer to the Activation Support line (877-777-4189), we confirmed that everything was working on AT&T's end and that ALL i was waiting on was an email from iTunes to actually activate the phone.
2:00 PM - by this point, i had to leave to get to a gig about 3 hours away. i left the iPhone at home (still not working) and took my old Verizon phone with me (still working). I fully expected an email by my return in the morning - after all, that would be MORE than 24 hours since i started this process, right?
3:00 PM - the old Verizon phone goes dead, and my number is now ringing to an AT&T voicemail. i am hopeful that this signifies that the elusive email is waiting for me!
Sunday, 7/1/07
12:00 PM - i get home, and run to the computer - and NO $%#^@& EMAIL!!! I can't believe it and really start to lose my patience. I put in one more call to the regular iPhone Activation line (877-800-3701), fuming mad at this point. I am on hold over an hour, and it's obvious that this is a different call center than on saturday (different hold patterns). I finally get to talk to someone around 1:40 PM- he says that everything looks fine, and that i will be getting the email any second! I check my email, and by god, there it is! I had just checked it 1 minute earlier, so the only explanations that make sense are that i just HAPPENED to call and get through at the exact moment that my email would go through - OR - that he could somehow tell the system to send out that email. Either way, it started working, and i've had no real problems since!
I know this is long, but i wanted to share how it worked out for me, in hopes that it may provide the info someone else needs to get their phone going.
All in all, i called 5 different phone numbers to get it working.
I believe that i had two major problems that caused it to take so long - the plan screwup on the servers, and the SIM not being activated from AT&T. Once these were taken care of, the iTunes system could send the final email, but probably hadn't because of the volume of activations. additionally, i think that porting from Verizon may have introduced some other errors into their systems. In the end it's all speculation on my part.
Good luck to all those who are still trying to get their phones activated. I feel for you, brothers and sisters!
