Droopy's Journal

It turns out that when they say the phone will be activated on Friday, that means Thursday.

The address book copy ended up not being that good. A number of entries were missing and it only copied them to the SIM, so any multiple phone number entries were broken up into individual entries. So, I infraredded the remaining ones from the old phone over to the new one.

Cingular had some issue that prevented me from buying ring tones from the phone or the website, but that is now fixed. The AOL IM codes that Cingular uses are different than AT&T, so I have to program those all in.

I am now up and running...

I have decided to switch my old AT&T wireless phone to a Cingular phone and a Cingular plan. Of course, as you would expect for me, this was not trivial.

Before I explain the details, those of you that call my mobile directly, be advised that there might be an outage of the 551 mobile number while the conversion happens. You can use my old 298 mobile number (if you do not have it, I can give it too you). The toll free and Minnesota number will temporarily forward to the 298 number until I know everything is ok.

I have a Nokia 6820, and love the phone. I keep getting "SIM registration failure" on my phone, especially when roaming. When this happens, I have to reboot the phone. I cannot get any service for this phone because it is an old AT&T wireless one on an old AT&T wireless plan. I also had dropped this phone in a driveway and stepped on it scraping the display soon after I got the phone. So, it has had a scratched display for a long time. I decided now was the time to change. I had an old AT&T TDMA phone (Nokia 6160) and I recently converted it to a Cingular Nokia 6102 without any problems.

I went the Cingular web site, and they do not offer the 6820. I called them and they said I have to pick what is on the web site. I went to the Nokia site and saw that they were selling the 6820 with a Cingular plan. I called Cingular back and they said if I did that, I would have to get a new number. I do not want a new number. I do not need a new number and do not want to pay the termination fee on my existing number. I was resigned to having to upgrade to a crappy Nokia phone and then buying a 6820 on the open market and switching the SIM (I am in the process of doing that for my backup 298 number; I bought a Nokia 6102 and am moving it to a Nokia 7820). So, I looked at the Nokia site to see how to do that and I stumbled into how you can convert an existing old AT&T account to a Cingular account and upgrade it to a new 6820. Ah ha. So, that is what I did. I had to fill out 500 screens of information, but it now says my order was processed and the phone will ship tomorrow and arrive Wednesday. It supposedly arrives activated, which means my existing phone will be likely deactivated sometime in the next day or so...

Now I have to sort out how to best set up the "mycingular.com" stuff to replicate what I had on "mmode.com". I presume they will force me to switch. On the 298 number, I never used mmode, so I am not sure if it took me to mycingular.com because I had nothing or if it would have deleted the mmode stuff and forced me over.

I ordered voice over IP telephone service from a commercial provider. I will not name names (). I ordered service with a phone number in San Francisco* as the household number and a second number that rings only (cannot dial out on that number, they call it a signature number) in my local area. They contacted me by email yesterday and told me because of E911, they had to switch the numbers so the household number was my local number and the SF number was the signature number. Grrrrr. If that is what I wanted, I would have ordered it that way. I told them I did not care about 911 for this line, I have another line for emergency purposes. Too bad, the FCC is "so very strict on this." Yeah, right. You mean your systems are junk because Vonage and Voicepulse have no problem with the configuration I ordered. I told them to cancel the service and I will reorder it with an SF address. Oh, if I have an SF address, they can just use that for 911 purposes. I just have to make sure I never call 911 from that number or the police will show up at Burger King in Palo Alto.

*some minor details changed