My wife and I successfully made the switch to the ip5. I'll post our story and hopefully it'll help somebody along the way. Let me know if you have any questions.
So a little background to help. We currently have a family share plan where my wife and I both have UDP an we have 3 other lines that are dumbphones (non-smart phone with pay as you go ata plans.) All lines are available to upgrade except my phone. I didn't pre-order because I wanted to wait until people tried out the "loophole" to see if it really worked and to see what the process is so I would be able to "help" in case the Apple/VZ employee didn't know what to do. I've been monitoring the threads all day and got a pretty good idea of what to do. So I didn't pre-order and I didn't camp out at 12am. I went to work and when I got home, I swung by the VZ store and thought I'd just try my luck. Well, lady luck was not with me as they were sold out and she said that if I ordered not, I would get an estimated delivery time of Oct 19th. I thought I heard wrong so I asked again and she said Oct 19th. I said wow, I'll just try and shop around. It's not that big a deal. If I get it today, I get it today. If not, I'll get it when I get it. Anyways, I went home and called my closest Apple store and they said they still have some in stock but wasn't able to give me exact inventory numbers. I called a second Apple store to see if they would give me inventory numbers so I know if they had the model I wanted for the carrier and the second store gave me better info. I told my wife, let's go. I decided to swing by the first locaiton because there was only 7 people in line and I'll try my luck there first. Lady luck was on my side. I wanted 2 32gb white ip5 but the guy in front of me got the second to last ip5 so I thook one 32gb and one 16gb. As I was waiting in line he decided to go for a 64gb so I swapped my 16gb for the 32gb and all was good.
So we went to ring up the transaction and the lady actually messed up and picked up 2 16gb and when she rang it up, i questioned the total because it was obviously less than what I expected. After telling her that it should have been 2 32gb, we had to go back to the guy handing out the tickets for him to vouce that I had 2 32gb ip5. So I got the 2 32gb ip5 but the transaction was already in play so they had to go through a whole proess of canceling. At the end of the day, it was canceled but that whole process wated one upgradable line. Luckily, I had 3 dumbphones that were upgradable so we used the other 2 to complete the transaciton.
So as far as the "loophole" is conerned, it's not really a "loophole" as we were just calling it an alternate upgrade or something like that. One VZ employee at the Apple store had no idea what I was talking about but another person knew so I worked with her. I asked her if people were using the alternate upgrade and she said yes and she had the process down pat.
So she did complete the switch by having me logging into
www.verizonwireless.com and then clicked on the Switch device link so it seems that this is the way to go. She did ask the Apple employee for two sim cards so it seems that you will need the cards. Once the phones were set up, it did take a minute or two to go through the process and actually connect to LTE so be patient.
So I will say that the phone is running on LTE with unlimited data. When I got home, I logged into my account on-line to make sure my plan still shows unlimited data and it does. I also noticed the plan details also shows 4g or LTE data so I can confirm the LTE is working. I did also have to hit *228 on the other phones (the dumbphones) to re-activate them. I checked all of the other phones through the on-line acct and all is good.
The update dates on my phone are untouched and show May 2013 whereas my wife's phone line still shows an available update. The 3rd dumb phone line also still shows and available update. The other 2 dumbphones lines do show that the next available update is 2 years out so it did extend the contract but I'm not switching to AT&T nor Sprint so I don't care about that. It seems that as long as VZ allows this alternate update route, we can keep the UDP going. If they wise up and change their policies to really force us into the tier data plans, it looks like we'll be keeping our ip for a very long time.
Sorry for the long post but hopefully, it gave you some helpful information.
