Hi I just wanted to thank everyone on this board for a lot of useful information.
I have been reading this thread for a long time to prepare.
So I tried out a lot of things and I'll just spell out what I learned as my way of showing appreciation for all the others that have taught me.
I started up 4 lines of service in the last week or so for my family.
I first activated one of the lines, then tried this. No go with my existing setup. I tried again using a brand new activation and that never activated. I got 2 emails, but no activation email. I wonder if this is because I never activated the line according to ATT.
I first attempted to activate on an Windows 7 machine + Itunes 10.5 and no go with my iphone 2g. I got that blank iphone screen when I plugged the phone in. From what I have read, this may be a software issue with the phone or itunes and it eventually may fix itself given enough time. I then proceeded to spend a lot of time jailbreaking using redsn0w .9.4 and restoring to IOS 3.1.3
For me, I'm impatient so I read from a lot of posters that this process is fairly hit or miss. I decided to take an 5yr old laptop and reformat the hard drive and install windows XP on it and itunes 8.0 only. That didn't work since it required a later version of Itunes. I ended up going to Itunes 8.2 since that was the recommended version for iPhones. When I plugged that in, it kept giving me "iphone activation has expired. please plug in the phone again" (I paraphrase since I can't remember the exact words).
I ended up using Itunes 10.2 and installing that.
I did not have any firewalls or anything running. I still suspect this may be a problem for some users who can't get their activations to work. But this is only my personal opinion.
Once I connected, it asked for all of my information and I did continue, selected the unlimited $20 plan.
Once I hit submit, I got the error about activation not complete because it timed out.
I checked my email. There were two emails: one about ATT is now Processing order , Thank you for your Order.
5 minutes later, I got the Activation Complete email.
When I checked online, I see the plan there with unlimited data.
Thanks everyone!
To summarize, I think it really is dependent upon your version of itunes + your operating system + iphone 2g. I couldnt get it to work with an existing laptop, but I did get it working with a newly reimaged laptop. And from what I've read on this forum, that appears to be the only factor that I can think of that explains why some people can get it to work and not others.
I can't get my iphone 2g to make calls or text messages but that's fine since I just wanted the grandfathered unlimited data.