Consumer Cellular sent me a new SIM card for my phone. I put it in this evening and tried to activate it online. I couldn’t get it to work. I got stuck in a circle of “log in to activate” “activate” “log in to activate”. The other option was to call them. Well, good thing I have a landline since I don’t know how you would do that when you have no service. Anyway, I talked to a woman who said she activated it and it would take between 15 minutes and 3 hours to work. She said if it wasn’t working by then to call their test number. So 3 hours later it was not working and I called the test number. To hear that they are closed now and will be in tomorrow. I called the main number and, of course, they are closed, too.
It’s now been 4 hours. I’d like to have my service working if at all possible until I can get this resolved. So can I put the old card back or was it deactivated?
Sure you can put the old one back in. Indeed, I’d absolutely give it a try.
Will it work? No idea. But no harm in trying. If it doesn’t you can buy a temporary SIM to get you by (as if you were a tourist). Not ideal but it can get you by until you sort it all out.
That rather suggests that the entire activation process never began.
The usual symptom of activation is when your phone - with the old SIM - suddenly says no carrier - sometimes saying emergency calls only. That indicates that the network has been told that your current SIM is no more. I have found that only once this has happened does the new SIM start to work. Usually with a bit of a gap.
The one time it happened to me it was because the carrier was upgrading the network. SIMs older than some particular generation weren’t compatible with the upgrade, and the carrier was proactively upgrading everyone. This seemed to particularly be an issue for those of us who had been loyal customers for a long time, dutifully swapping the ageing SIM from phone to phone.
Thanks for the link. Yes, I was told last night that I was being switched to a different network. From what I read at the link, it may not be a good thing. I’ve been very happy with their service and would hate to have to switch to something else. I’m going to put the new SIM in again shortly and call them.
You probably noticed in the comments that they are going from Team Oble and AT&T to AT&T only. You might possibly not have a good AT&T signal where you are. Compare the signal strength you get with the old SIM vs the new one.
After talking to three people who were basically spouting nonsense, I finally got someone in the “porting” department who knew what she was doing. She had the new SIM card activated within minutes. This was the first time I’ve dealt with their customer service and I wasn’t impressed. The signal strength is not as good but hopefully I won’t have any issues with that.
I’ll just have to wait and see how it works out.