History may be repeating itself with Apple iPhone owners on AT&T’s only prepaid service that supports the device.
Despite many common misconceptions (some propagated by AT&T itself), iPhone can be activated on GoPhone prepaid service. The GoPhone Pick Your Plan is billed as a compatible option for iPhone owners who use more data than voice, offering a lower cost and no contract option.
However for the second time in nearly two months, iPhone users have been without data service on their GoPhone accounts… for over a week… again. The previous issue surrounded a failed DNS server, specific to GoPhone accounts. Users could only access web sites if they knew the IP address of the site itself.
This new outage however affects the iPhone’s ability to connect to EDGE data services completely. Users are informed with an ominous error that they are not subscribed to EDGE data whenever iPhone attempts to connect to the web.
AT&T has flip-flopped on the status of the issue. Initially AT&T acknowledged the issue, and had a temporary fix. However, the fix failed and AT&T has since fallen back on the position that they are (as of today) “re-investigating the issue”. AT&T does not have an estimate on when the problem will be fixed.
PhoneNews.com was instrumental in resolving the last GoPhone national data outage, which severely impacted iPhone customers. AT&T’s NOC was unaware of issues affecting GoPhone data connections, and when customer support would not relay these issues properly, PhoneNews.com instructed readers shut down AT&T call centers with influxes in calls to report the issue. The issue was then properly escalated and resolved.
