My Activation Fiasco; READ THIS BEFORE YOU GO WITH METRO!

[OcalaFlGuy]

So I've asked a metric buttload of what some here may have thought were just DA nOOb questions about activation with Metro.

Why all the questions? To try like hell to avoid EXACTLY the dorked up craphole I'm IN NOW.

I started with the activate at 11 AM this morning by going with the *228 option. We didn't get far. As soon as I read them the sim card # we hit BZZZT! TILT! FAIL! I was told the number Metro had for the sim card did not match what I gave them. They said I HAD to return the phone to Best Buy and get another phone/sim card. THIS MEANS RETURN THE PHONE THAT I'VE SPENT THE LAST 2 DAYS GETTING SET UP EXACTLY LIKE I WANTED.

So I called up BB and we got on a 3 way call with Metro. We spend AN HOUR on two separate 3 way calls with Metro. The phone then makes calls but only shows EV for data, not 3 or 4G. Finally after this hour, the Metro person says it is a METRO issue they've known about for a day or so with just phones bought from Best Buy. (I think part of the problem is that Best Buy DOESN'T wand in the sim card # to the base transaction as the sim card is sealed up inside the packaging and the number isn't otherwise available on their phone packaging.) Best Buy reads Metro a 2nd sim # out of another Motion package and Metro clears this as Okie Dokie. I STILL however have to go into BB and trade phones as just trading the sim cards won't work according to Metro. So into BB I go. (During this convo, the BB girl says she happens to be looking at another Metro phone there that's showing 4G so coverage isn't an issue.)

They give me another phone and get it all set up. (Yeah, right... ) When Metro goes to set my $55 plan up, they want to charge me $3 to do a debit card transaction over the phone. What the hell is up with that!!?? Screw it, if $3 gets me going, at this point, FINE. #2 BZZZT!, TILT!, FAIL!, the phone will just like before make a call but shows only EV for data. The BB girls starts to say, "Oh we're inside, blah, blah, excuse, excuse" and I tell her, "The girl I was talking to on the phone here before said SHE had a 4G showing and I'm NOT leaving here til it shows 4G on my phone." I suggest that she go outside and see if it switches over to 4G there. She does and of course, No Joy. When she puts the phone down I notice a download progress bar showing and ask her what that was. She says the software update. ACKKKK!! Yes, that would be the SW update I WASN'T GOING TO DO on this phone after reading up on it here and I tell her to KILL the DL. She does, but not quick enough. I check the phone version and it's showing D version . Then Metro tells them to hard reset the phone, that doesn't work and it's still on the new D version with no 4G. Then BB tells me they HAVE TO do the update to get it to work. (Damn dumb as***!) I tell them no you don't but you CAN process a refund for the phone.

So, here I sit. After 4 HOURS playing around with this mess and a trip back to BB, my wallet is now $58 lighter and I don't even have the all set up on my end ready to go phone I had this morning anymore.

I will end up making the 70 MILE roundtrip tomorrow to the Corporate store in Gainesville to start all over again. I am waiting on a callback now from the girl who was so helpful with questions when I called in the past to be sure they have a Motion in stock. I don't know what the hell I'll do if THEY are out of Motions. At least I can prove that I AM on the $55 plan NOW if this drags on for a couple more days and the $55 plan end happens.

Metro, if there appeared to be ONE OTHER VIABLE CHOICE to me besides trying more with you clowns or staying with my $85 a month Verizon, I'd do that. But I've researched it and there really isn't.

METRO COULD YOU PEOPLE PLEASE TRY AND GET YOUR DAMN ACT TOGETHER?! There is no way on God's green earth this should be this tough to accomplish.

More on this as it progresses, or not.

Bruce in Ocala, FL

 

[alfick3]

So...The phone then makes calls but only shows EV for data, not 3 or 4G.
Bruce in Ocala, FL

EV is 3G. It stands for EVDO.

 

[unnamedny]

Sorry to hear all this. it sounds like BestBuy fault.
Best Buy is going to file chapter 7 really soon for the obvious reasons. Their prices (in most cases) are ridiculously high and their customer assistance is horrible.

Why would you want to get a phone from best buy? why not get if from metro PCS store? Why not get it online?

 

[AndroidDroidOne]

Sounds like a.total disaster especially for a new member.

 

[OcalaFlGuy]

Sorry to hear all this. it sounds like BestBuy fault.
Best Buy is going to file chapter 7 really soon for the obvious reasons. Their prices (in most cases) are ridiculously high and their customer assistance is horrible.

Why would you want to get a phone from best buy? why not get if from metro PCS store? Why not get it online?

Except that Metro already said the sim issue was on their end with their numbers not jibing with the one in the Best Buy package. If it were just a BB sim card # issue with a Sealed Package from BB the 1st try should have gone fine.

I went with a BB phone as I did my homework and read the Metro return policy. There is ALL KINDS of Ifs, And, or Buts, fine print there for them to get out of taking the phone back. I've gotten a phone before from BB, they don't have such hoops to fulfill to take a phone back.

So far as online goes, the Avid JUST came out, no one here in it's first week out has apparently even HELD one that was working so there is NO data on them. Before I could find THAT out, there wasn't enough time to get a Metro phone online to me and still make the $55 plan deadline of 12/31.

Bruce in Ocala, FL

 

[unnamedny]

Except that Metro already said the sim issue was on their end with their numbers not jibing with the one in the Best Buy package. If it were just a BB sim card # issue with a Sealed Package from BB the 1st try should have gone fine.

I went with a BB phone as I did my homework and read the Metro return policy. There is ALL KINDS of Ifs, And, or Buts, fine print there for them to get out of taking the phone back. I've gotten a phone before from BB, they don't have such hoops to fulfill to take a phone back.

So far as online goes, the Avid JUST came out, no one here in it's first week out has apparently even HELD one that was working so there is NO data on them. Before I could find THAT out, there wasn't enough time to get a Metro phone online to me and still make the $55 plan deadline of 12/31.

Bruce in Ocala, FL

Ok so it was Metro's fault. Still It sounds like you got really unlucky.

I would recommend to all first time buyers to go to the store and get it there with activation.

I would call Metropcs and ask to speak with the manager to demand some compensation like a free month of service. If they refuse tell them that you are going to complain to FCC and BBB here is the link http://www.fcc.gov/complaints

 

[OcalaFlGuy]

I would recommend to all first time buyers to go to the store and get it there with activation.

Unfortunately, in this case, neither You nor a single other person here mentioned this was any kind of a singularly preferred option in ANY of the multitude of questions I'd ask BEFORE I actually started the buy/activate process.

Hindsight is Always 20/20.

Bruce in Ocala, FL

 

[AndroidDroidOne]

All indicators look like you should stay with your $85 Verizon plan.

 

[OcalaFlGuy]

All indicators look like you should stay with your $85 Verizon plan.

That IMO is a premature, unsupported analysis.

Nothing so far indicates how the Motion will actually work for me once activated Other Than the call quality from here was just fine. (Which actually goes Against your analysis...)

If the vast majority or even Just A majority of Metroers had the issues I had today and posted about them here I might agree with you, but, they haven't.

For me to stay with Verizon for 2 more, they'd have to better the $400 credit to my account And give me a hot deal on a top shelf phone they did on my Last reup. To get that from them involved recording all the calls with them and using the recordings and emails they'd sent that they Really Do Not Want to send to get them to do what they Said they'd do to keep me. (And frankly, I'm getting too old to Want To Go into a Texas Death Cage match with ANY carrier over ANY damn cell phone.)

While today's Metro abortion actually came close to that in pain, at least I'm not saddled with another contract because of it...

Bruce in Ocala, FL

 

[AndroidDroidOne]

If what has happened to you happened to me I sure would not want to do any business with that company. It's not worth the time or troubles at all. I'd just suck it up and sign a new contract or by the phone outright then have to deal with such nonsense. In the end hopefully you get what you want and all works out.

 

[Joshb101]

Btw you could have bought a Motion from either Wirefly or Metro themselves online and got it delivered to you before the deadline. And that was repeatedly pointed out to you, not to mention it was almost 100% agreement that you should go with the Motion over the other phone.
Its up to you to pick wherever you buy from, but I haven't had and I haven't heard of anyone else having these kind of problems with their UICC cards from Wirefly or Metro so while Metro might be willing to take the blame sounds like both of them are at fault not just Metro.

Sorry for all the trouble you're having, but seriously this sounds more like an issue with Best Buy and Metro being unable to communicate properly then any real reasons to avoid Metro.

Btw the 2nd time it just sounds like the UICC card wasn't activated. Which seems like a lot of in store people are incapable of doing properly.

 

[OcalaFlGuy]

I actually called both Metro and Wirefly about getting phones sent. Both needed to be bought by no later than the day after Christmas to ensure I'd get them in time to activate. IF I'd gone with Wirefly and had the same issues I would not have been able to return the phone and get a new one in time. I was trying to wait as long as I could as I was waiting for info here from Metro employees about the new Avid that was slow in coming.

Perhaps you missed the part where I DID take the general advice to get the Motion over the Avid. (Sorry, I DID all my homework beforehand on this and the one party in this I don't see doing anything wrong is me.)

There is not One Single Word Anywhere Here Or Online Anywhere that would lead me to expect this kind of issue with a BB phone and activating it. Of all my many talents, blindly predicting the future isn't one of them.

On the second activate try at BB maybe I wasn't clear that BB was on the phone WITH Metro for that too. So it wasn't Just BB either. I give BB a bit of a break here since they can't be Complete Experts on every single carrier they represent when we can't expect many Metro store employees to be knowledgeable enough of their OWN carrier that pays their paycheck. (And again, Most of what BB was doing with the phone <the SW update excluded> there were doing while talking to Metro.)

It doesn't really matter who's fault it is, there should have been no issue whatsoever activating a BB phone, new, sealed in package.

Bruce in Ocala, FL

 

[twogbsd]

I got my Motion from BB and activated it within 15 Minutes via *228 with 4G and everything...

 

[unnamedny]

as everything in life, plan well ahead of time. You are not being happy is particularly because you are having troubles at the new years eve.

It sounds like the second issues is not activated 4g sim card, for some reason it happens to many.

As lg motion owner, Im glad you went with it. Restart it every few days and its going to run like nee all along.

 

[telegraph]

Things to keep in mind op.
1. Make sure Metropcs has 4g @ the location you are activating at. Care only has a generic coverage map to go by. Store reps who do not activate phones will not know either.
2. You could always take the phone to another retail store which specializes in activations to help you activate the phone.
3. You can always manually program the phone as long as you have the mdn and msid. To me, this is always a lot faster than the *228 options.
4. Factory resets will not reset firmware updates.

 

[trigger1074]

there are about 3-4 thousand phones that have an issue liek this. They come in our system as belonging to metro or some error like that. The numbers on the packaging do not match the numbers on the phone. We were supposed to submit them to Metro to be fixed if we had purchased any of these phones from Brightpoint. My guess is that Best Buy got these phones from Brightpoint and never fixed them after the problem was discovered.

 

[Fox Mulder]

Sorry to hear about your troubles.
There is something to be said for going directly to a Metro corporate store in the first place vs. a third party. I've gotten all 4 of my Metro phones from the local corp. store and never had an issue with activation or any other part of the process. Of course something can always go wrong even at the store but it's less likely. And I can understand why you didn't go there first since it's a long trip for you, don't have that issue here as the store is 20 minutes away.
Good luck getting this sorted, I'm sure you will within the next couple of days although it's unfortunate that the holiday kind of gets in the way. The Motion is a great phone and you should be very happy with it once you have full service.

 

[THE W]

just got my S3 today and im having the same issue. i can call and everything else but no 4G.

funny thing is my now deactivated lg motion while not being able to call out still shows a working 4G signal.

whats up with that?

EDIT: im an idiot, thats whats up with that. i needed to put the sim from the motion into the S3. 4G worked like a charm.

 

[OcalaFlGuy]

All things are well that end well.

I got back awhile ago from the Corporate store in Gainesville. Unfortunately my very helpful girl there wasn't in even though they told me yesterday she would be. Plus they hadn't gotten Any of my emails to their (the girl and her supervisors) Metro email. That sucked. One of those was an appreciation note about Shannon's great service along with the new Metro rates she didn't have a week ago and one was the OP here. (This ties into the one small spot of Metro bad news today.) A younger guy named Javier took care of me and did a Great Job.

Just as telegraph mentioned above, right after, "Is Shannon here", the next words from me were, "please show me a phone that's on and showing FoGee". Which Javier was happy to do.

I now have a new 2nd Motion in 2 days and *everything* (that I can tell so far) is a Go on it. Even FoGee. I checked in the store to be sure My Phone had FoGee which it did, took and received a call, and got on-line. D/L Speedtest and couldn't get it to pick up a local server. The ones it showed were 700-1000 miles away and the test results sucked. Still webpages loaded fine and faster than my Verizon 3G.

It was still a freekin' mess though from yesterday as they basically opened a SECOND account for me and killed the first one which meant I lost a fairly easy to remember phone number. Then at the end, the Mgr transferred my $55 plan over to my new active plan. Everything went easy peasy. I did get a tad of good Karma, I got to pick an easy to remember prefix and the random number it shot out to finish my number makes my 2nd number in two days Zeelyuns times easier to remember than the one yesterday. (Maybe the easiest to remember I've ever had on any phone.)

The only bit of bad news mentioned above was that Javier was the only one (since they hadn't gotten my emails) who heard the whole story of yesterday's lack-o-activation massa-cree complete with the 47 8x10 color glossies, with circles and arrows drawn all over them. Sooo, Ms. Manager wouldn't bite on giving me any free schwag for my inconvenience and misery yesterday. Oh well, if that's the worst part of the experience I'm not complaining. While I was there a guy was buying a new S3. Lucky dawg.

Got home, tried a text, Jim Dandy. There is one bit of not the best news signal wise. First the good news is I was watching the signal strength and looking around coming into town on The Beeg Road and I think the Metro tower is about 3/4 of a mile from me. The bad news is that on my street the signal drops to 2 bars. *Just like yesterday with no service, I'm showing flipping between 1 and 2 bars* but still showing FoGee. Web performance seems fine. Too dang bad it didn't stay at 4 bars. I even finished upgrading my Metro on-line account so that shows my correct phone and plan, ($55, YAAHO! probably one of the last to get it. ) so I'm ready to go there too. If I can get Speedtest to find a server within 700 miles of me that doesn't return a 300 ms I'll report back when I get some reliable speed readings.

Thank you everyone with your patience with this nOOb and ALL of your help, I REALLY Appreciate it. Now to start getting this 2nd Motion set up like the one I had yesterday was.

Bruce in Ocala, FL

 

[AndroidDroidOne]

All things are well that end well.

I got back awhile ago from the Corporate store in Gainesville. Unfortunately my very helpful girl there wasn't in even though they told me yesterday she would be. Plus they hadn't gotten Any of my emails to their (the girl and her supervisors) Metro email. That sucked. One of those was an appreciation note about Shannon's great service along with the new Metro rates she didn't have a week ago and one was the OP here. (This ties into the one small spot of Metro bad news today.) A younger guy named Javier took care of me and did a Great Job.

Just as telegraph mentioned above, right after, "Is Shannon here", the next words from me were, "please show me a phone that's on and showing FoGee". Which Javier was happy to do.

I now have a new 2nd Motion in 2 days and *everything* (that I can tell so far) is a Go on it. Even FoGee. I checked in the store to be sure My Phone had FoGee which it did, took and received a call, and got on-line. D/L Speedtest and couldn't get it to pick up a local server. The ones it showed were 700-1000 miles away and the test results sucked. Still webpages loaded fine and faster than my Verizon 3G.

It was still a freekin' mess though from yesterday as they basically opened a SECOND account for me and killed the first one which meant I lost a fairly easy to remember phone number. Then at the end, the Mgr transferred my $55 plan over to my new active plan. Everything went easy peasy. I did get a tad of good Karma, I got to pick an easy to remember prefix and the random number it shot out to finish my number makes my 2nd number in two days Zeelyuns times easier to remember than the one yesterday. (Maybe the easiest to remember I've ever had on any phone.)

The only bit of bad news mentioned above was that Javier was the only one (since they hadn't gotten my emails) who heard the whole story of yesterday's lack-o-activation massa-cree complete with the 47 8x10 color glossies, with circles and arrows drawn all over them. Sooo, Ms. Manager wouldn't bite on giving me any free schwag for my inconvenience and misery yesterday. Oh well, if that's the worst part of the experience I'm not complaining. While I was there a guy was buying a new S3. Lucky dawg.

Got home, tried a text, Jim Dandy. There is one bit of not the best news signal wise. First the good news is I was watching the signal strength and looking around coming into town on The Beeg Road and I think the Metro tower is about 3/4 of a mile from me. The bad news is that on my street the signal drops to 2 bars. *Just like yesterday with no service, I'm showing flipping between 1 and 2 bars* but still showing FoGee. Web performance seems fine. Too dang bad it didn't stay at 4 bars. I even finished upgrading my Metro on-line account so that shows my correct phone and plan, ($55, YAAHO! probably one of the last to get it. ) so I'm ready to go there too. If I can get Speedtest to find a server within 700 miles of me that doesn't return a 300 ms I'll report back when I get some reliable speed readings.

Thank you everyone with your patience with this nOOb and ALL of your help, I REALLY Appreciate it. Now to start getting this 2nd Motion set up like the one I had yesterday was.

Bruce in Ocala, FL

Welcome to MetroPCS.

How did you get your MetroPCS online account to show your correct phone? Mine shows my plan under Overview, but instead of showing or saying my phone make & model it says, 'ICCID' with a blank picture. When I click on View/Edit under ICCID it brings me to My Phone and says, 'Sorry. Product ICCID no longer exist' thus not giving me any option to select my correct phone. I know it had something to do with the activation process because I can't even get the myMetro app to load my account info, *611 can't find my account even when it ask me to type in my phone number with area code and the Visual Voicemail app won't even setup giving me provisioning errors. Other than that my service works great.

 

[ktchong]

If you have activated the phone online for free, you would have gotten a chance to win a $1,000 from MetroPCS.