Well, I am trying to transfer my at&t “wireline” home phone number to a new cell phone. I’m having a very difficult time doing it. Here’s the ridiculously long story.
My at&t home phone has the basic phone number on it that I’ve had for a very long time, so I want to keep that number no matter what happens. But I also have a third party DSL provider on the same wireline. I do not want that to be disconnected. I just want to move the phone number from at&t to Cricket Wireless. I looked at Cricket plans online and I can save ten dollars a month and get several features such as caller ID and free long distance calls that I don’t have now on my wireline. I also found that Cricket has a sales kiosk with real people in a local mall.
I went to the mall and told the salesdroid what I wanted to do, and he went ahead and started to process my purchase. When he went to ‘port’ (transfer) my phone number from at&t to Cricket, it gave two error messages. It refused to complete his request. He tried other things but came up with the same error. So he recommended I go to the at&t store, which was only a few hundred feet away in the same mall. So I went down and a nice and very helpful young lady helped me with some possible problems that Cricket may have caused. She also told me that Cricket is owned by at&t. She then sent me back to Cricket. Cricket did a few things but got the same error messages, and asked me to try the at&t store again. I went back and forth twice more but Cricket still couldn’t get the phone transferred.
Back at Cricket, the guy tried to do something else that the lady at at&t recommended, but it didn’t work. This was to call an 800 number that was supposedly only for customer reps to do ‘porting’. Another one of Cricket’s salesdroids suggested that I get my wireline number changed to a wireless number before I transferred it to Cricket.
I got a call from my friend. He said the news vans from all of the TV stations were out along his street. The big news was that someone found a KKK flyer with a Tootsie Roll in front of their house (this is Martin Luther King day). The rest of the world has so many big problems, but what makes the news is a minor incident of finding a piece of paper with just some words on it. How stupid!
I went back to at&t to tell the lady the call didn’t work. At first she tried to sell me their own wireless plan, but I told her no, their plans were more expensive and had lower data caps than Cricket. She made the same suggestion, to transfer my wireline number to an at&t wireless plan before I go back to Cricket. I asked her how much, and she said it was ten dollars. So I took her advice and went ahead with the change. She sold me a full size SIM card, did the changeover and gave me an account number and PIN.
I went back to Cricket (I’m glad they are only a few hundred feet from each other!) and gave the salesdroid the info, PIN and SIM card. With this he was able to complete the ‘port’ or changeover from at&t to Cricket.
He then put the SIM card into a flip phone and tried to call it, but it still had not been ported. He checked the computer and it said that it was still in progress. He told me that sometimes it takes just a few minutes, sometimes it takes an hour or so, and sometimes it takes a few days. He recommended that I come back tomorrow and gave me the link to the at&t online site for checking the status. I thanked him and left. A few hours later I checked and it said the porting was still in progress. I checked again the next morning, and it said it still was in progress. The message was:
Transfer Status: Your transfer request has been submitted to your previous service provider. A response has not been received. Please contact Customer Care at 1-888-898-7685.
Note: Please check att.com/port for updates on your transfer request.
My guess is that the third party DSL line is why it has not been completed. Also I think it will not be completed because the third party provider will need a phone number and the port will remove that. But I can call my number and my wireline phone still rings. Hopefully I haven’t lost my DSL service.
I have been thinking about another possible way to get data service to my home PCs. I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 with a data plan that is limited. I have turned on the WiFi hotspot capability of the phone and this allows me to log onto this hotspot with my PC. It works OK but I was surprised at how fast the data gets used up when I use Google Maps or watch YouTube videos. I can switch this phone over to Cricket and get 3 GB of LTE data for five bucks more a month (after that it slows down to 3G speed). If that’s not enough I can buy increments of 1GB more 4G LTE data for $10 a month. I can get $10 a month discount for having 2 numbers on the same account. And there is the special $100 discount until the end of the month, which I am using to pay for the LG L70 phone.
I checked the at&t site and it said that the transfer will happen tomorrow night at 9 PM. So that means the soonest I can get back to cricket is the day after tomorow.
Update Sat Jan 24 – I found that my wireline phone had no dial tone. I also lost my DSL service (I’ll have to work on that later). I went back to Cricket in the afternoon and completed the switchover or ‘port’. I found out the $100 discount did not apply to at&t, so the LG phone was no longer free. The salesdroid said that I could get the $75 rebate if I got the Motorola G, but I would have to sign up for the $60 a month plan the first month and then switch to the $35 plan the second month.
I got the phone switched over, and wrapped up the transaction (or I thought I was done). I immediately went to another store in the same mall and bought a protective case for $27. I went over to my friend’s house and while I was showing him the new phone I noticed that it would get stuck on the first screen of boot up. I took the case off the phone and the phone didn’t get stuck, it booted properly. I put the case back on and it got stuck on boot up. My friend and I determined that the case was pressing on the on/off button, and its spring was too weak, so the button stayed depressed. We went to the mall to eat, then I went back to Cricket to get it fixed.
The salesdroid agreed that the button was held down, but he thought the cause was the protective case. My friend and I went back to the store where we got the case and the salesdroid tried three other new cases to see if any of them would work okay with the phone but they all had the same problem. She said that the phone is probably the problem, so we went back to Cricket. We told the salesdroid what happened so he got another new phone and put the case on it, and it worked okay. Apparently the button was a fraction of a millimeter higher than normal, and it was a hair trigger – it clicked when pressed very lightly. I waited another half hour for him to exchange the phones and complete the switch over.
Later at home I plugged the phone into the wall adapter to give it a charge. I tried using it, but the touch screen was flakey, I would have to touch the keyboard two or three times to get it to respond. Later I tried typing but i t was even worse. I unplugged the charger and the problem disappeared! I tried a different charger but it still became unresponsive. Something is causing interference with the touch screen. This phone is a bummer!
I came to one conclusion that this was much less than a positive experience. A year and a half ago I switched my T-mobile flip phone (monthly bill) to my new Samsung Galaxy S4 (prepaid) and had a less than positive experience, but this time it was much worse.
