Why would I have to put a different sim card into a phone on AT&T to get it “unlocked” so that I could put that new service sim card in and activate with the new service and port my number from that old AT&T account to the new service …. right?
Well, I had a Note8 on AT&T and got a sim card for Google Fi, it’s a number we were going to have for a house phone, but decided it was for our daughter after all now. So easy right? Not.
I could get it activated with Google Fi, but the port failed. I went to AT&T, nothing obvious there, nothing at all. So I restarted and this and that and blah.
Finally put the AT&T sim in and after a second restart …. bling. Message from AT&T about porting and needing a reply in order to do it. Wasn’t a blessed message about that anywhere else, not on other phone, or email, or website …. nothing. So great, replied with the right code in messages and they were so sad we were leaving all unlocked though, good to move forward.
Fine.
Had to call Google Fi 800 number. Ouch. Not fun. I am not prejudice, it’s just a point of not understanding the call center person who answered my call to help me … oh my goodness it was a trial that made me literally MANIC. Finally he had it reset to port again. After a lot of misery that is.
He insisted we had to contact AT&T again to get fraud protection turn off or else it would fail again. AND that we’d have to wait 5 to 6 hours before trying it or it’d fail.
What a joke. Guess whatever happened was who’s fault? No clue. This time all I could do was put in a Sprint account number and a Sprint pin. All it could do was nothing porty at all.
Our account wasn’t a Sprint account, that phone number was AT&T. It was a “Sprint phone number” a long time ago, but that Note8 phone had always been only on AT&T.
So this time the transfer couldn’t even work, right? We had a start over button. Yeah.
So we got a Google Voice number
and ported that to the Note8. Worked out just fine.
The main thing about Porting a number in is, an existing phone (at least a previous AT&T phone) brought to Google Fi has to Factory Reset in order to receive other Fi calls. Which is painful if not expected, well even if it is expected it’s painful.
My Note20U had to do that, and our Note8. That’s the end of that kind of thing for us. Phew. Thankfully.
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