Thats interesting. So a given iPhone can now have a combination of the following locks:
* carrier lock
* APN lock
* region lock
How is that even legal?
Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
81–90 of 120 posts
Re: Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
#82I use StraightTalk in NYC with an official unlocked iPhone 4S, because it's less than half the price of AT&T, but dealing with them has been horrendous. If you aren't good with computers, forget about it, ever.
They supply their SIM cards with a list of "settings" (APN), but it turns out 1) you can't access them on an unlocked iPhone, and 2) they're both wrong and incomplete anyways. Calling them up, their customer service told me it will never work without jailbreaking my iPhone (which is completely incorrect), and gave me another set of settings to try, which also didn't work.
In the end, after much Googling, experimentation, etc. (including the T-Mobile SIM card swap trick), I discovered the following worked:
- Download the Apple "iPhone Configuration Utility"
- Create a profile with not just correct APN settings (att.mnvo) but also the proxy server and port (66.209.11.33:80), despite the fact that the customer service representative kept insisting it must be left blank
- Attach the profile to your phone, and restart it once or twice
I've accepted the fact that MMS will simply never work, but most people I know use iMessage anyways, so I don't really mind.
The absolute worst part was a couple of weeks ago, when StraightTalk decided to change its proxy from 66.209.11.32 to 66.209.11.33, incrementing the IP address by one. My data didn't work for two days, calling them gave me someone else completely unqualified who insisted that they never need to tell anyone when they change their internal settings, because iPhones detect them and self-update automatically, etc. And that besides, nothing had changed, and a proxy isn't necessary anyways. It was only through trial-and-error that I discovered the new functioning proxy (because it happened to be the same as the MMS one, now, unlike before).
So, you will save money, but the experience is horrible. It is ridiculous that Apple doesn't expose APN/MMS/etc. settings on their unlocked phones, and it's ridiculous that StraightTalk can't even provide minimally correct information to their customers on how to get their SIM cards to work.
Re: Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
#83Should an unlocked phone be able to function on any carrier without hacking? Yes. If I had my way, there would even be laws guaranteeing customers this ability. However, I really can't sympathize with you at all. You intentionally and knowingly chose to do something that was not officially supported. Now you are complaining that your hack stopped working. If you wanted it to always work, you should not be doing somet…
How is it not officially supported? Isn't the whole idea of a factory-unlocked phone that it is officially supported on any carrier?
Re: Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
#84I am in the boat as you. After a few months I just accepted that MMS will never work on my iPhone. Google voice doesn't support mms anyway and I would rather be able to get MMS in my email.
Re: Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
#85I use StraightTalk in NYC with an official unlocked iPhone 4S, because it's less than half the price of AT&T, but dealing with them has been horrendous. If you aren't good with computers, forget about it, ever. They supply their SIM cards with a list of "settings" (APN), but it turns out 1) you can't access them on an unlocked iPhone, and 2) they're both wrong and incomplete anyways. Calling them up, their customer s…
In my experience, the proxy server for the internet APN is not necessary, and in fact hinders certain functionality (I know that it at least blocks the download component of Speedtest.Net; when I saw that, I didn't bother to use it long enough after that to figure out what else it was breaking).
I am currently using a configuration profile generated with the Configuration Utility in order to work around the internet access problem. It works fine for that, and I had no problem setting that up. I've had no problem with the service and no problem with configuring it provided that I had a place to enter the values that needed to be configured.
Back when I used the iOS 5.x modified-iTunes-backup procedure to modify the APNs, I found that all I needed to do was to change any of the default AT&T APNs to the "att.mvno" one and leave everything else the way that AT&T had already configured it for their service (including all of the default MMS values). So I haven't been using the Straight Talk supplied web proxy since day 1, and it's worked just fine. MMS used to work fine, too.
The thing that galls me about the MMS problem from a practicality perspective is that a friend of mine who doesn't own an iPhone could send me an MMS message, and not only would I never know that they sent it, but they would never know that I never got it. From their perspective, it was successfully sent, and nothing got kicked back to them. From my perspective, nothing ever showed up.
Re: Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's how the value prop from the carrier works out across all of their subscribers. _I_ am paying for my x GB in a monthly fee, and I am resultantly entitled to all of it, as are everyone else who pays them. Now, we all know their network doesn't have that sort of capacity, and that most don't use their x GB, and that's how they turn a profit... but that doesn't change the fact that, having paid them, I am now…
And to the extent to which that is false advertising, I agree with you: I even mention so much in the talk. However, you aren't paying them enough to actually get that service, and it isn't because they are screwing you. ...and no, I'm sorry, but the fact that the carrier in question is prosecuting your friend is off-topic and entirely irrelevant to this pricing problem. You thereby have to frame these kinds of thing…
I don't know why techies aren't more accepting of paying more for bandwidth or paying in smaller slices rather than having most people pay for far more than the use. I mean, I guess I do know why techies are against that sort of thing, because they're more likely to be heavy users, and the current situation subsidizes heavy users to a pretty substantial degree. But still, basic fairness would seem to dictate that this stuff ought to be a little more sane.
Nobody seems to mind paying for precisely metered electricity, gas, or water. But the moment you want to meter internet usage, it seems like people swarm out of the woodwork to shoot it down, even though it seems that the current "unlimited" model is responsible for a lot of our current problems.
Re: Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
#87am I the only one wondering why you need MMS so bad?
Re: Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
#88I use StraightTalk in NYC with an official unlocked iPhone 4S, because it's less than half the price of AT&T, but dealing with them has been horrendous. If you aren't good with computers, forget about it, ever. They supply their SIM cards with a list of "settings" (APN), but it turns out 1) you can't access them on an unlocked iPhone, and 2) they're both wrong and incomplete anyways. Calling them up, their customer s…
In my experience, the proxy server for the internet APN is not necessary, and in fact hinders certain functionality (I know that it at least blocks the download component of Speedtest.Net; when I saw that, I didn't bother to use it long enough after that to figure out what else it was breaking). I am currently using a configuration profile generated with the Configuration Utility in order to work around the internet…
Yeah, I truly don't understand at all why my 4S refuses to access data unless I put in the proxy. StraightTalk says I don't need to, other people on the Internet say I don't need to, but my own experience shows me it simply doesn't work without it. I haven't got the slightest idea why.
I also can't for the life of me imagine why the iPhone config utility doesn't have fields for MMS. It seems like such a strange and pointless omission.
Re: Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
#89am I the only one wondering why you need MMS so bad?
Maybe because not all of my friends have iPhones and cannot use iMessage to reach me, and have no idea that when they send me an MMS that it's just going to disappear into a black hole, and I'd rather have the option of not missing any communication?
Re: Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
And to the extent to which that is false advertising, I agree with you: I even mention so much in the talk. However, you aren't paying them enough to actually get that service, and it isn't because they are screwing you. ...and no, I'm sorry, but the fact that the carrier in question is prosecuting your friend is off-topic and entirely irrelevant to this pricing problem. You thereby have to frame these kinds of thing…
I don't know why techies aren't more accepting of paying more for bandwidth or paying in smaller slices rather than having most people pay for far more than the use. I mean, I guess I do know why techies are against that sort of thing, because they're more likely to be heavy users, and the current situation subsidizes heavy users to a pretty substantial degree. But still, basic fairness would seem to dictate that thi…
Electricity, gas, and water all have something critical in common: they are heavily regulated, so you're paying more or less cost for them.
When Internet usage gets metered, it's because the carriers think it will allow them to massively overcharge everyone, and take more profit; and they're right.
I'm not opposed to an Internet-as-utility model, where it's metered but there is _some_ mechanism to ensure that the charges are related to cost, and not just made up.
The market _ought_, in an unregulated industry, to be that mechanism, but in consumer internet service provision we have a sort of half-regulated industry, where there is never more than about a duopoly of providers in any given market.