You should try 02, we have lots of crackberries which require a data enabled blackwibble enabled sim card and half the time I order them they are not provisioned correctly even though they are emailed.

I've had occasions of repeating myself over and getting dead new sim cards. Very annoying.

Cell phones are becoming nothing but government spy tools. Do you think that every cell comes with a GPS chip for nothing. There was also an article I read where the FEDS in the USA can and did use the cell phone as a ease dropping device and could listen into conversations even if the phone was not having a call, only in standby mode. Oh yea the movie 1984 comes to mind.

Sorry, but this is just a case of someone non-technical trying to do something very slightly technical. It's not news.

This as I see it would only strictly be a problem for the mobile network companys in the first 14days. After that they would not be required to take the handset back and neither would the retailer because as you say with the original sim card there would be NFF. NFF = No return.

I've had similar issues on many occasions, and even ringing up asking the cs-op to check data is provisioned doesn't always get the answer you need. Particularly galling has been when I've ported numbers into both o2 and T-mobile, on both occasions the port has caused the data services to need re-provisioning - something that surely should happen automagically. And don't even get me started on them sending out new SIM cards with upgrade handsets and the same problem there too.

In Orange's defence, when my mum got one of my cast-off handsets, she tried and failed to send an MMS, but the network twigged what she was trying to do, and a day or so later she got a SIM update and they'd provisioned data.