Reader Christian has an iPhone that is activated on a pre-paid GoPhone plan with AT&T. The EDGE service has stopped working properly for quite a few GoPhone-style iPhone users in California and Christian isn’t having much luck with AT&T’s customer service:

Since Saturday many iPhones in California and several other states, that are on GoPhone plans, can not access their name servers on the EDGE network any more. This causes all network related services to fail in normal operation. If the browser is fed with IP addresses instead of website names it will access the sites, but this is not a viable workaround.
Like hundreds of other iPhone GoPhone users I have reported the issue repeatedly and gotten the runaround.

I spent more than 4 hours on the phone, more than 2 of them on hold, talked to about 20 different AT&T and Apple technicians and yesterday finally was bluntly told: “You only are on GoPhone, so you don’t have a contract with us and we don’t have to provide service”. We have to thank Erik in the Albuquerque, NM call center for this redefinition of US contract law.

This Erik also offered these gems:
“The iPhone does not work on GoPhone” (it works just fine just like any other GSM phone)
“There is no EDGE service add-on for GoPhone” (weird that AT&T is selling the service if it doesn’t exist. Also it worked before the outage)
“Apple is running its own network for iPhone so we can’t support iPhone issues”

Anyway, my service is still down and so is the service of countless others and it appears nothing is done about it.

Yesterday I sent an EECB to the AT&T CEO, Randall Stephenson, hoping it will get fixed, but as of this morning I have not had any response.

We checked AT&T’s website for the “we don’t have to provide service” clause in their GoPhone plan terms and conditions, but we couldn’t find it.

Sounds like they really don’t want you using the iPhone on their GoPhone plan instead of getting the fancy 2-year contract. Anyone else having this problem?

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