I’ve had an AT&T GoPhone pay as you go plan for quite a while now. It suits my needs quite nicely. All of the sudden, though, my account and phone number no longer seem to exist. The automated systems insist that my phone number is nowhere to be found in their records.
Anyone know if anything happened with that plan recently that might’ve caused my account to go away like this? I’d think that my account “expired” if I hadn’t used my phone just fine on Monday.
My daughter is a CS rep with AT&T wireless. I will ask her if there’s something up with GoPhones. It may take a while, since she can’t text me back until she goes on break.
The SIM card on my phone simply fell out of it and into the void the other day. That’s what the message on it said, anyway.
I turned it off, pulled it apart, took out the battery, took out the SIM card, then put it all back together. Problem solved.
Can you try that?
She said sorry, she doesn’t deal with GoPhone, call 611 or go to an AT&T store. 
Well, it’s back now, but while it was gone, I tried calling 611, and it didn’t help. It just repeatedly told me, no matter how many times I entered the number in, that it couldn’t find my account, then suggested I call 611 to be logged in automatically (ha) or go to an AT&T store, then hung up on me.
So I would’ve gone to the store had it not returned. I’d just love to know what happened last night, and if it was in any way, shape, or form something I could avoid in the future…
Not the same problems, but related to GoPhones:
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I finally decided I have need to get with the 21st century (but only slightly), and so bought my very first mobile phone – an AT&T GoPhone with the el-cheepo 10-cent a minute plan. (Well, I had a cell phone for a while a few years ago, but, like, that was soooo then…)
I’ve had this phone for a little over 24 hours already, and already I don’t really like it. It just seems seriously user-unfriendly. I am NOT interested in sitting around for the next three weeks just exploring all the menus and features and things I can play with. And the so-called user’s guide is useless.
Example: It comes, by default, with that loud and raucous AT&T-default ring tone – you know, the one that always shakes the plaster out of the ceiling every time (someone else’s phone) sounds off at the library. I finally figured out how to turn down the volume – but I really want a ring tone that sounds like a simple plain-old cell phone ringing. I was not even able to figure out if this phone had any other ring tones I could choose from, let alone how to select it. And AT&T’s web site, under the ring-tone page, has ONE FUCKING HUNDRED AND TWENTY PAGES of 30 ring-tones each for me to choose from – all of them songs and stuff, none of them simple sound effects (that I could find). So I went back to the Parrot store in person to get someone there to show me how to do it.
Another example, still unresolved: Caller-ID doesn’t do what I think caller-id normally ought to do, and is, IMHO, basically useless. On both incoming and outgoing calls, the person receiving the call sees the caller’s phone number, but NOT the person’s name. The rep at the store told me I could go on-line to set up my display name for others to see – but I sure can’t find anything of the sort on the AT&T MyAccount page. And she told me that for wireless phones, incoming calls don’t show the caller’s name. They just don’t. It just isn’t done. (Unless I put all my caller’s phones and names into my contact list, in which case it looks them up there. Sorry, that’s not what I’m asking for.) So I went to the nearby T-Mobile store and asked them, and they told me essentially the same thing – unless, maybe, they have a more expensive plan that includes this.
It’s all bullfuckingshit, I think.
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Can you tell me exactly when you discovered that it didn’t work? Your post time is 12:49 AM, and I can tell you that that’s in the part of the day when they schedule maintenance windows on the prepaid network. Normally, that shouldn’t affect your service, but if your account was being migrated to another server or something like that, it’s possible that it was in a temporary block state, which locks it down completely to prevent corruption in the transfer. Even that should only last a few minutes, though.
Unfortunately, they’re right, as far as I know. If I recall correctly, the protocol has a parameter for the calling party number, but not for a name. It’s also possible that the system doesn’t even have a name to go with the number, especially if the call is coming from outside the AT&T mobile network.
Scuttlebutt says this may be changing in the future, but if so, I’d guess it’s at least a year off, and probably won’t always give you a name even then.