Over a month after iPhone has been released, iPhone users who chose to opt for AT&T’s $50+ iPhone prepaid plans… are still having nagging issues with the service.
Specifically these issues are affecting users on GoPhone Pick Your Plan, which Apple and AT&T offer to customers who don’t want to provide their social security number (or who have sub-par credit), are constantly being informed that they have spent $0 after an internet session.
The GoPhone prepaid system is designed to alert users after each call, text, and internet session how much it cost, and how much they have remaining on their account. However, iPhone users are being “reminded” that the last internet session cost $0.00… upwards of 50 times a day. This is because iPhone plans have unlimited data, but the plan has no provision to disable the GoPhone notifications regarding data usage.
Heavy iPhone data users are affected the most, but even users that casually surf the internet are also impacted. iPhone displays these notifications even when the internet is not accessed by the user, such as when Visual Voicemail messages are downloaded automatically.
AT&T technical support representatives are more defensive than motivated. They claim that this is an important feature of prepaid, and that it merely is an inconvenience. Eventually, most readers that have called in to complain say that technical support says that a fix is “in-the-works” but with no estimated time of repair.
And this is not the first serious problem involving iPhone and GoPhone. Users with defective iPhones report that they are unable to activate a replacement iPhone on an existing iPhone-activated GoPhone account. Meaning, if your iPhone stops working, you must sign up with a new account, forefit all rollover minutes and money you’ve paid… not to mention your phone number.
Update: AT&T has issued a network update that has fixed this issue. While some have reported iPhone firmware 1.0.2 as fixing the issue, AT&T has let us know that all GoPhone users will no longer receive balance notifications, when no money was actually used. Users will continue to receive balance notifications after money has been spent (for example, at the end of a phone call).
