No data allowed for AT&T prepay Iphone users?!
 

I have an unlocked iphone that I use for travelling around, and have just changed my AT&T prepay rate to the $50 a month unlimited plan, which includes unlimited calls, texts, international texts and data for "regular phones".

The small print reads:

The rates shown are:

500 MB $25
100 MB $15
5 MB $5

However, according to the agent, I cant use the iphone (and she also said Blackberry) even with the purchase of the above data packages, which if true is rather unbelievable, and then also makes AT&T useless as a network for the occasional US traveler.

Does anyone have any info/experience with this?

Ace

AT&T has a longstanding policy of not activating iPhones on prepaid plans. The solution is to set up a data plan with your SIM in a non-iPhone and then just put the SIM in an iPhone.

Then also swap that sim back into the non-iPhone on occasion. When AT&T does their system sweep and see a GoPhone sim in a iPhone they kill the data portion of the service. This used to happen every 12-18 hours, not sure now as I've moved on to Big Red(VzW and another pre-paid GSM provider in the US).

This has been driving me up the wall for years now. I am paying for a certain amount of data. Whether I use it with an Android phone, an iPhone or a flipping ZX81 is none of their business.

It's like an airline selling you a ticket and then denying you boarding because you are wearing jeans.

Are there other viable options? I've heard H2O prepaid sim will do the work. Any words on this?

I really can't understand this at all to be honest, they should be delighted that you're using masses of data if they're charging for it.

How long has this (and the system sweeping) been in effect? I didn't know about it at all during the summer, and used my iphone, purchasing data bundles with no problem at all.

There are several active threads over on Howardforums on this topic indicating that it works just fine on gophone using an AT&T locked iphone (or an unlocked iphone obviously). You have to go to an AT&T store and get a new SIM card and not tell them it's for an iphone. Don't expect to get fast 3G speeds though.

http://www.howardforums.com/forumdis...-amp-T-GoPhone

officially, at&t does not support iphones, but they will work, including data. you must activate it on something else and swap the sim. you might need to use a custom apn, but that's easy to do.

at&t will check for a smartphone on normal postpaid accounts and 'upgrade' your plan if they see an iphone or other smartphone, but gophone is not swept.

Actually on GoPhone the SIM gets locked to the device for 6 months when you activate it. So you don't want to activate the SIM card in another device. But you could swap it from another device if it's was activated more than 6 months ago. There's lots of good info in the HoFo GoPhone forum I linked to in my earlier post.

that only happens with the gophone kits that bundle a phone, sim and some bonus value.

it does not happen with standard at&t sims, which can be obtained at any at&t store or off ebay. if you get it at a store, they might want you to activate it at the same time, so bring another phone. otherwise, the sim can be activated online.

How does one time the swap with sweep? One doesn't know when AT&T would their sweep.

there isn't any on gophone.

Well, activated a prepaid microsim with ATT GoPhone 50$ plan today, and I'm so far unable to use the data. Seems like ATT now does not allow the included data to be used on smart phones :-/

Any workarounds to get this data working short of buying a 25$ data pack?

for some reason, at&t offers normal and smartphone plans that are identical other than that normal plans can use either data packages or pay per use at 1c/5kb, while smartphones must get a data package. there is no pay per use on a smartphone plan. you dont say which plan you have, but if it's the smartphone plan you will need a data package.

the other issue is you probably need to change the apn.

Does anyone know if the unlocked iPhone can be used on the T-Mo network? I have an AT&T iPhone with (obviously) their service, but I remember the early iPhones that were 'jailbroken' were easily able to be put on the T-Mo network.