Consumer Cellular has a pop up warning when customers sign in. They’re sending my mom a free replacement 4G flip phone. CC did the same thing in 2018 when 2G shut down.
My phone was a Sony Xperia xz2. Claims to be 4g compatible but the Consumer Cellular tech looked up the IMEI specs and it didn’t have 4g certification. It might work or might not after July 15.
The Xperia was bought in 2019 and the battery isn’t holding a charge. Bought a Samsung Galaxy A52 5g from Amazon. $499. That’s a lot better price than the Galaxy S21 at $799.
But wait, I still wasn’t done. I called Consumer Cellular to register the Galaxy phone’s IMEI number. They emailed detailed instructions to setup a APN (access point name) on the phone.
The current wait times at Consumer Cellular are crazy. The online chat queue was 40 callers deep. I finally called and left a number for a callback.
I assume it’s just as crazy at the other cellular carriers. But their shut down date may be different.
Consumer Cellular leases AT&T’s network in many areas of the US. I guess CC was told to get their customers 4g ready.
I downloaded the pdf from The Verge. My Xperia xz2 is not on the compatible list. My Galaxy A52 5G is on the list. Which you’d expect for any 5g phone.
Or they have an increasingly smaller number of 3G customers and their lease agreement with AT&T makes it economically advantageous to move them all to 4G even if CC are still technically able to buy that capacity.
I don’t understand why a new APN had to be entered manually. You’d think the carrier could program it remotely or provide the programming on a new Sim Card.
Consumer Cellular has a lot of older customers. Imagine asking a 79 year old to go into Android settings Connections, Mobile Network, APN and enter several fields and save. I’m a computer tech and it made me a bit edgy. I’m definitely not a Linux or Android specialist. I know just enough about Android to get by.
CC may have everything setup on phones bought from them. I compared their prices to Amazon and they are about the same. I wanted a specific Galaxy model that CC didn’t offer.
I got the notification from CC and I’ve already gotten my new phone. I don’t like it as much as my old one (not entirely because it’s different, but because it lacks some features the old one had) but since I mostly use it for texting with the occasional phone call, I can deal with the features that I dislike.
Honestly, the biggest irritant is that it uses a USB-C charging cable. I have a gazillion MicroUSB chargers, but I had to buy some Cs - like one for the car and one for at my desk and one to go in the basement. I like to be able to charge where I want when I want. At least the new one has an actual ring tone that sounds like an old phone ringer.
When I worked for T-Mobile, we kept trying various techniques for ‘over the air’ updates. Part of the problem is there are a ton of phone models, which may or may not have current software, and in many cases, the customer didn’t have any internet access other than the phone itself. So if they weren’t on wifi, or if their software was out of date, it didn’t work.
Which is why most companies (T-Mobile of 2 years ago included) only provided basic tech support from a BYOP device (Bring Your Own Phone). I’m sure part of it was of course to encourage people to buy a T-Mobile phone, but the sheer amount of work it took to try to work with partially supported phones was a contributing factor. When they want you to have a 6 minute or less call, and walking someone through the APN issue was normally 10-20 . . . yeah.
Oh, an SIM cards are fundamentally network keys (yes I’m greatly oversimplifying it’s not needed for this point), they don’t really store anything other than a few phone numbers if you use that feature.