- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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People under the age of 25 are too young to be able to afford cynicism - Diogenes the Pseudo Pesky Cynic
SIM swapping causes Orange data havoc
WHAT WE suspect might prove to be a common problem after the Crimble season was finally resolved yesterday. An INQ reader found his mother's Orange SIM hadn't been provisioned for data. So it couldn't access the mobile web at all.
The problem stems from a common practice – although one which the network operators frown on – for people to buy a pre-paid handset for friends and relatives at Xmas as gifts.
Wishing to retain their existing telephone number, recipients simply replace
the new SIM card with their own existing SIM.
In this case, a reader's Mum put her SIM card into a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone
and was then perplexed that it didn't work properly.
She wanted to download music but couldn't get it working. Voice calls worked fine.
The poor woman called Orange technical support and was then baffled by science with terms like WAP and GPRS.
Her son went through all the usual communications settings on the handset and couldn't find anything wrong with the set-up, although he was puzzled by one option which set the handset to either CS only or CS and PS.
This means circuit switched (CS) or packet switched (PS) and if you don't opt
for PS, then GPRS presumably won't be initiated.
In desperation the reader turned to the INQ for help and we suggested the son
tried his own Orange SIM in the new handset. Hey presto! – everything worked.
It was then a question of settling back and insisting to the Orange technical help desk that the SIM hadn't been correctly provisioned for data services.
All it takes to cure the problem is for Orange to send an OTA message to the
handset (which normally says SIM update). You read the message; delete it; and
then turn the handset off.
Wait for 15 seconds and when the phone is switched back on again, the data
services should miraculously appear.
The problem here for operators is one of handset returns. The woman very nearly gave the handset back before 14 days had expired. If she had done so, after it had been tested it would definitely have shown up as 'no fault found'.
So this common practice could prove to be quite an expensive problem for the mobile operators. µ
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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.
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.
Sorry, but this is just a case of someone non-technical trying to do something very slightly technical. It's not news.
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.
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.