100,000 iPhones Overwhelm Activation Server 166
dstates writes "What happens when Apple ships 100,000 iPhone 4S in a day? Answer, 100,000 users all try to activate their new phones. AT&T's activation servers are struggling under the load. Apparently Verizon and Sprint are doing a better job keeping up with the load." Adds an anonymous optimist: "The solution? Call AT&T by dialing 611 and talking to an operator to perform a manual activation with your IMEI and SIM card #, works every time!"
Redirecting the load? (Score:1, Funny)
Call AT&T by dialing 611 and talking to an operator to perform a manual activation
So now you'll just be overwhelming the meatbag variety of server.
Good service is good service (Score:5, Funny)
Surprise of the day: AT&T activation servers work roughly as well as their cell coverage in urban areas.
Note that if you can't activate your iPhone, you can't drop calls!!!
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I thought the news story was that somebody with AT&T service managed to contact the servers. And not just one person, but enough people to overwhelm the servers. In AT&T's defense, I'm sure they had no idea that any of those people would manage to get online to activate.
Haven't we heard this before? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Can't blame this one on Steve.
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Sure we can. Clearly, the Reality Distortion Field takes some time to completely dissipate. ~
The sort of problem you wanna have (Score:1, Troll)
Let's be honest, Samsung only wishes it could overload AT&Ts servers with Nexus S activations.
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YEs they do require the same activation, you just don't notice because despite what you may think no carrier has sold even half that many of any Android phones in a day...One did reach about half in a weekend though. Not sure why you think the carrier doesn't have to activate Android phones.
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Yeah. Except that AT&T has 4 years or experience wit
I just received and activated.. its restoring now. (Score:1)
Activated using the dial in number from my old phone.
It asked me to turn off my new phone for five minutes. I did so.
I turned it on after 5 minutes to my delight... AT&T 3g
There was a very short on hold while "Please wait while AT&T activates your phone" had me on hold. But it was maybe 45 seconds.
Number I called: 866-895-1099
Something's coded stupidly methink (Score:4, Insightful)
"Activating" a cellphone means little less than recovering a few personal details from the new customer, the phone's serial number or equivalent, stuffing everything in a database, working out some magic number based on some algorithm and send it back to the phone. Big deal... I can write an application like that without even being a specialist and not hose a small server with a million requests a day, let alone 100,000...
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"Activating" a cellphone means little less than recovering a few personal details from the new customer, the phone's serial number or equivalent, stuffing everything in a database, working out some magic number based on some algorithm and send it back to the phone. Big deal... I can write an application like that without even being a specialist and not hose a small server with a million requests a day, let alone 100,000...
Sure, it's easy to write a standalone server to take requests and put them into your local MySQL database, but you're stuffing it into the same database that the data for 75 million other customers are using and probably traversing several layers of API and who knows how many network hops to get to that database.
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That's why things like that should be shoved into a local flat file or database and periodically merged with the big database as a batch job as a back end process.
It's not like the server load after a new iPhone comes out is a surprise.
Re:Something's coded stupidly methink (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you're doing it very wrong. Firs and foremost, most of these customers were already identified ahead of time (because they preordered the phone), so you could have *easily* extracted their information beforehand and copied it to the "local mysql database". Additionally, writing back to the "central database" could be also easily offloaded to a background job that performed the work asynchronously. There's no need to have this information instantly available in the central.
While the customers may have been preidentified, their phones IMEI/SIM's weren't assigned until the phone was shipped. And until you link a customer account to a phone, you can't activate the phone. In any case, even if you prestaged the data somewhere, you still need to flip the switch at the appropriate time to make the new phone active, and that's probably the heavyweight transaction, not the act of entering the new data into the database. I imagine that a phone activation means replicating the data across many regional sites. Even though I called it a "database", it may not even be a database in the traditional sense, it may be a custom cell phone controller with a complicated API with high latency for updates.
Since in many (most? all?) of these cases, the old phone was replaced by the new phone, customers don't want to activate it online, then find at some random time in the future (minutes? Hours? Days?), their old phone stops working and they have to switch to the new phone - they want it activated immediately so they can turn off their old phone and turn on the new phone and have it up and running immediately.
I imagine that the transaction monitor on their transaction processing system allocated a limited number of transaction slots to the activation servers - they don't want to take down their entire network due to high activation demand.
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Or, a better idea, they could just not have activation. Like every other phone in existence.
Yes, I'll take a cheque.
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Or, a better idea, they could just not have activation. Like every other phone in existence.
Yes, I'll take a cheque.
What cell phone doesn't have activation? My Verizon phone had to be activated. My T-Mobile prepaid phone had to be activated.
Is there some carrier that ships a phone already activated and ready to go with no activation required? What happens if you order a replacement phone? How do they know when you're ready to deactivate the old phone and activate the new one?
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They generally ship me a pre-activated SIM card. Just put it in your phone (or move it between phones) and be ready to go.
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The SIM card. Where I come from, activation only happens with CDMA phones, and we no longer have a CDMA network - we're all 3G up in here.
They forgot slowdown curves are hyperbolas (Score:5, Informative)
People assume slowdowns are always linear, so they get the wrong answers, and under-provision all the time (;-))
Assume a really fast activation in 1/10 second, on a machine that's always got 10 CPUs free for the activation jobs. Each CPU will activate 10 phones in 1 second, but if 11 people per CPU request activation, the 11th will wait a full tenth before they start, plus 1/10 second to do the work. The 12th will wait 2/10 plus 1/10 to do the work, and so on.
100,000 people / 10 CPUs = a load of 10,000 users. Plug that into the queuing equation from which I got the above, and the average time to activate will be 999.1 seconds, or 16 minutes. Not fun!
The actual case is probably a lot worse, with slow activations and overloaded servers, but any time when you can get a really large number of users trying to do something in a short period of time, the average time to do the work will be scary large. Unless they just happen to be within the first 10 callers, of course!
That means that you need to temporarily allocate a hugely larger number of resources than you'd expect on first glance. If you and your manager don't already know that the response time curve looks like a hockey stick, you can easily get into a career-limiting situation by under-planning for a predicted overload.
--dave (wearing his capacity planner hat) c-b
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Assume a really fast activation in 1/10 second, on a machine that's always got 10 CPUs free for the activation jobs. Each CPU will activate 10 phones in 1 second, but if 11 people per CPU request activation, the 11th will wait a full tenth before they start, plus 1/10 second to do the work. The 12th will wait 2/10 plus 1/10 to do the work, and so on.
No, that does not follow. Your math assumes that the 12 caller will have to wait for the 11th, like the 11th had to wait for one of the ten preceding callers to finish. That's not true. The 12th caller can take the place of any of the preceding callers. He'll be only marginally slower than the 11th caller.
Unless, of course, someone has locked each registration to a CPU when they enter the queue, but why would anyone do that?
In reality, registrations won't even be assigned to separate queues ahead of tim
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Thanks, I indeed said that wrong! It's actually the 21st. The equation does do it correctly, fortunately (I use qef and jmt, by the way)
--dave
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But yea, this is an iPhone story, not a real story.
Wow, 100,000 activations... (Score:5, Interesting)
100,000 AT&T activations, out of well over 1M sales!?!?
If so, most people have heeded the advice: Sprint is cheaper, and Verizon you can make phone calls on.
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Yep, people would have to be idiots to go with ATT. I'm still with them and the only reason I am is that I'm locked into a 2 year contract. As soon as the contract expires, I'm going to Verizon or Sprint. Just as long as it's NOT ATT.
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I've never really had problems with AT&T's network here in southern California. From what I've seen, it's noticeably faster than Verizon's 3G (and, with an iPhone, there's no 4G option) and I can probably count the number of dropped calls in two years on one hand.
That said, I did run into an interesting situation last weekend. I was downloading some data from the Internet using EDGE (test case) when I got back an error basically saying that my Internet connection had gone down. This had never happene
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It's according to where you live, I guess. I get 1 to 0 bars with Verizon (at home), but get full bars with AT&T. I still hate them, but no other choice.
No Sprint towers, so the signal is the same as Verizon.
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Sprint customers can use the Verizon network. So, why use Verizon?
I confirmed this the hard way while trying to activate my iPhone with Sprint w/o WiFi. I had 3+ bars and couldn't get the damn thing to activate until I accidentally wandered into the 1 cubic foot of space where I could get Sprint's signal.
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Sprint customers can use the Verizon network. So, why use Verizon?
Sprint can use Verizon for voice and 1x data, but they do not use Verizon's 3G service.
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100,000 AT&T activations, out of well over 1M sales!?!?
I think the one million sales figure was for international sales, not US only.
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If this were the iPhone 5, with LTE data speeds, I'd have pre-ordered and switched. As it is, I'm already used to the way Android does things (i.e., the unpolished bits don't bother me much) and will probably get a Galaxy Nexus or
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Depends where you live. Around here I'd have significant difficulties downloading anything from AT&T via 3G, it would regularly lose connectivity mid transfer and moving to EDGE would be unreliable. I ended up just turning off the 3G because my downloads were a lot faster with EDGE.
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Why would you go with AT&T, when you can spend the same amount for service from Verizon?
The 4S is a true world phone... (Score:3)
It is both CDMA and GSM in the same phone.
All US carriers lock the phones.
But the 4S actually is a true world phone, so after you've been "good" for 2 months Verizon will release the Sim Lock and you can put your prepaid burner sim in it, and until then they will provide a sim if you want pricey roaming before then.
This is actually better than AT&T which just won't release the sim lock AFAIK.
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Will Verizon actually release the SIM lock, though? Things seem to be "different" when an iPhone is involved. AT&T, for example, will release the SIM lock for every one of their phones except the iPhone. I suppose we'll have to wait two months to find out.
Optus has this problem too (Score:2)
Optus in Australia has this problem too. Almost no one switching from them to another phone provider (and taking their phone number with them), was able to make the switch. Additionally, their website was down almost all yesterday.
All the other providers seemed to have managed it a lot better.
Poor state of infrastructure in the US (Score:2)
In case anyone thinks that the US has good/solid infrastructure, remember this moment.
The AT&T network is so poor that it bogs down when a vendor comes out with a popular new phone.
Now let's see if you can actually make a call while in Manhattan.
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"In case anyone thinks that the US has good/solid infrastructure"
No one thinks that, our internet sucks, ota tv is useless, our power grid fails multiple times a month during both summer and winter, roads are a crumbling joke and bridges and dams are falling apart.
Then there is the bipartisan government circle jerking for a decade racking up the bribes so GE can sell off our R&D to Brazil, while our kids are taking pieces of the road to chuck at each other cause they are too stupid to not even play in t
DONT FOLLOW THE ADVICE ON THE BOTTOM OF THE POST (Score:4, Funny)
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Apple's servers will reject your phone due to "mismatched SIM" and it will refuse to activate
Now there's a perfectly ordinary sentence. Why the hell does Apple's server or any services Apple offers need to be attached to the phone rather than to a customer account?
worked for me (Score:2)
Not to mention... (Score:1)
Wasn't that bad (Score:2)
Only took me 2 tries, at about 7pm est.
Activation server? (Score:2)
Why do you need an activation server at all for???
If done right the subscription you have shall already be activated, or activated when you purchase it.
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Which still is stupid if you have a SIM card that connects to the subscription.
100,000? (Score:2)
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I never said it would fail ... I just don't like the excessive hype that gets generated every time
I think it's kind of cool (Score:3)
I'm not in danger of ever buying an iThing, but I like it that people get excited about new tech things. It means that technology still has the power to move us emotionally as humans. It means new stuff is still happening. The tech can touch our hearts. Otherwise it's boring.
Me, I like boring. I like letting everybody else try the new thing usually - the only exception these last 30 years being the Asus Transformer I bought on launch day. But the idea that tech has the ability to move us emotionally
Is it just me, (Score:4, Funny)
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I own an Android, and have no interest in getting an iPhone, but I think it's worth being clear that not all iPhone owners, or even the majority of them, buy the phone as a status symbol. It's only the people who run out to buy each new model as it's launched, even though their old one is perfectly good, who are guilty of conspicuous consumption.
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Did you read my link? Apparently some Apple fanboi with mod points didn't.
", even though their old one is perfectly good, who are guilty of conspicuous consumption"
which would be a majority of people in that line. I mean, why wait in an Apple line, when you could walk 50 feet and get the same thing if you aren't there as a status symbol?
Everyone does conspicuous consumption. I now make a point of thinking if that's the reasons I make purchase. And yes, sometime I make the purchase anyways.
I was just amused
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This.
I have an iPhone 4 and have no plans to upgrade to the 4s until its at least 2 years old. I boggle at the people who upgrade every year, but oh well, it's their money. I'm glad they're helping the economy. :)
Re:conspicuous consumption (Score:5, Insightful)
Something cannot be "par" and a status symbol at the same time.
It seems to me that if you're making this argument, you're just as positionally-conscious [wikipedia.org] as the iSheep (or whatever we'd like to call them), you just use different criteria, no doubt better criteria that is obviously more aligned with value than those other people you don't understand. /s
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Re:conspicuous consumption (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the iPhone's circumstance as a status symbol has always been rather patent.
The interesting fact is that a Nexus S or a Blackberry or a Droid Bionic are also status symbols -- just because your phone runs a different OS, or it has twice the RAM, that doesn't suddenly make your purchase decision perforce more rational or less status-conscious. The fact that Android and Blackberrys (not so much the second one lately) have defenders and people proudly stating their ownership on this forum clearly demonstrates that owning these phones confers status and attributes the owner with a particular set of values, independent of the actual rational decision to buy the thing.
I just don't think the "status symbol" argument is a useful one -- everybody buys status, and people who run around with Frodo t-shirts and Star Trek bumper stickers (that's me) and hiking boots that never see a dirt road should probably be careful about how they critique social signaling.
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I disagree. At the beginning it was a good leap in what we could carry around. Music, phone, good interface. Usable, useful, and practical. It developed into a status symbol item.
It was an observation of an interesting phenomena playing out it real time.
Personally, I try very hard to be sure Im not making a purchase for status.
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Personally, I try very hard to be sure Im not making a purchase for status.
Why? Do you think status is an invalid reason to buy something? Normally I'd consider that a rather subjective value judgement.
Maybe you're insecure. Maybe you think you'll look like a chump if you buy a popular thing. Deciding you won't buy something for "status" is really just a way of saying "I'm buying something that rejects prevailing trends." Of course, that still makes the phone you buy a status symbol, it's just tuned to a different value system and peers.
Nobody needs a dual-core 1GHz cellphone with
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Or, perhaps, feature lists (or "levels of technology") are not what people care about.
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That's just not true. Design does not mean shiny. Design means good engineering, and good user interface. That is what I am paying for. I'm also paying for the superb customer service I've gotten from Apple over the last 20 years.
Never been cool, never will be. Status is irrelevant. Design is relevant. Customer support is relevant. Technical aspects of the phone aren't irrelevant by any means, but they're not the most important thing.
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maybe you should take the stand in the Apple vs Samsung trial
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yes, by wording on my part. On par, as in equal to.
Again, my bad.
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As a conspicuous consumption item, the iphone 4S is actually a big bucket o fail: it looks the same as the old one. How many people griped that it didn't look like the "iPhone 5" leaks?!?
And I just bought mine (finally shifting from a dumb phone) for the technology.
The screen really is brilliant, and I wouldn't want a bigger screen (read, block-o-stuff) in my pocket, it can now actually work as a phone, the iOS app ecology is better established, the processor is excellent, and it really is an easy to use s
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I was at the mall, huge line, probably 150 people to get into the Apple store. Not 50 feet away is an AT&T store, also selling them. No Line.
I went and bought one this morning at the AT&T store. The store opened at 8:00, I arrived at about 7:55 and there were probably about 20 people in line ahead of me. 45 minutes later, I had my new iPhone.
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So, the non-status-conscious Android user proceeds from the assumption that only status-seekers buy iPhones.
Right?
Methinks thou dost protest too much. Why the hell do you care what other people do with their money? Why do you think it's important to belittle them?
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iPhone User: "I love my phone."
Android User: "I hate your phone."
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I don't hate the iPhone.
Never have.
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Ha, Android user here that says "I love this tool for communication and entertainment and I love the non-walled garden freedom I got with it"
I feel sorry for the iPhone users that they don't have the same without jailbreaking it.
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The problem with "Android" is that it rhymes with "Hemorrhoid".
Why would anyone want to buy something that sounds like a condition that is a huge pain in the ass?
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They had a top notch cool phone, but now it's par, if not lagging behind many android devises.
Citation needed.
And, let's make it clear, you won't find a citation to support your comment because it is false.
Here - unlike you, I'll back up my claim:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4951/iphone-4s-preliminary-benchmarks-800mhz-a5-slightly-slower-gpu-than-ipad-2 [anandtech.com]
The iPhone 4S is faster than virtually every mobile device currently on the market with the sole exception of a two top-tier tablets (the iPad 2 and, in one test, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which have more space enabling more power). Against
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Not only is the hardware top notch but he overlooks the most important reason the iphone still blows away the competition. Apple's development pipeline uses "native executable code" resulting in apps that run far faster and much more efficient. The hardware is as near standard as possible allowing developers to easily target a known platform. Then we get to the market vs the app store, there is no comparison the app store wins hands down.
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Are you saying that BOTH the AT&T store and Best Buy HAD THEM IN STOCK at the same moment there was a line at the Apple store?
If so, then I might agree with you... If not, maybe the Apple Store had them in stock.. Also, haven't you ever seen a movie on the opening day? I haven't in a long time, and would tend to not do it nowada
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100,000 in a day isn't particularly great anyway on AT&T though, what happened to Apple having massive preorders that were supposedly newsworthy last week? Android sees around 300,000 activations on a normal day let alone near release, and the iPhone 4 (not the 4S) had just short of a million.
This seems to be an admittance that the iPhone 4S is a bit of a flop after all despite the pre-order hype. Certainly those sales figures are a little underwhelming compared to releases of previous iPhones.
But the r
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100,000 in a day isn't particularly great anyway on AT&T though, what happened to Apple having massive preorders that were supposedly newsworthy last week? Android sees around 300,000 activations on a normal day let alone near release, and the iPhone 4 (not the 4S) had just short of a million.
I think the problem of AT&T not being to handle 100K is not the number but that it is the additional number on top of normal activations they might have had that day and their systems can't handle the excess not the capacity. And the Android activation number is across all carriers not just one carrier.
and the iPhone 4 (not the 4S) had just short of a million. This seems to be an admittance that the iPhone 4S is a bit of a flop after all despite the pre-order hype. Certainly those sales figures are a little underwhelming compared to releases of previous iPhones.
According to wiki, Apple pre-sold 600K iPhones last year when they launched the iPhone 4 with 1.7M in the first 3 days after launch. According to Apple this year, they pre-sold 1M. It does not appear
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Buy an Android
For what?
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I take it you've never actuated a phone before?
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I take it you've never actuated a phone before?
Let me guess, you used Siri to post that?
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That would be, because the first thing that the phone does when it's turned on is... wait for it... contacts the activation server silently and activates itself. All phones must do this – it's simply a matter of registering that the IMEI is in use, and with what SIM it's currently associated.
Notably, this is exactly what an iPhone does – you turn it on for the first time, you see the setup screens (no date and time because you know... it does that automatically), and while you fill in a form or
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http://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+activation&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&lr=lang_en#pq=iphone+activation&hl=en&sugexp=kjrmc&cp=8&gs_id=8&xhr=t&q=iphone+4+activation&qe=aXBob25lIDQgYWN0aXZhdGlvbg&qesig=XLmPgR3zxn9b7jGXld54Ww&pkc=AFgZ2tlaUel7DP39FfKh34fxiYL1bHIbzn5WdbVX3hSy47HOmsADfaEgURfkrUAWR-BKQr3I9JAsxNpecw3Xs9tUpxxOE6HHiQ&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&lr=lang_en&safe=off&tbs=lr:lang_1en&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=iphone+4+activation& [google.com]
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Nice... a load of videos showing how it used to work... but doesn't any more with the 4S ;)
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Though if you're struggling to understand how Google search works, I'm beginning to see where your problem lies.
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That would be, because the activation is at the network end –they allow calls from that IMEI/SIM combination if and only if it's activated, or the call is to an allowed number (e.g. the activation line, or 999)
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I'm still doubting this happens on all GSMs. In al the years I've been using them I never ran into an activation of the device. I've been happily swapping SIM cards and phones/devices, they always immediatly work.
That's because if it works correctly, it happens instantly, without you knowing it happened. Often, it's even done by the guy in the shop, who has your phone out the box and SIM in it before you can say "nooo, I like unwrapping things".
So to me it sounds like AT&T is using a whitelist of IMEIs where all others appear to use a blacklist.
That's a nice conspiracy you have there.
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neither of my phones worked for 3 hours until the servers got caught up a bit. Very annoying
Wait... are you talking about Apple or RIM here?
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neither of my phones worked for 3 hours until the servers got caught up a bit.
Makes you wonder what they're doing so wrong on their activation servers.
100,000 per day still only amounts to a little over one per second. Even allowing for peaks, that shouldn't saturate even a moderately specced server. What are they running on, G3 XServes?
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Other than the fact that current RIM users had their service go down for no explainable reason for 3 days. With Apple and AT&T, their new phone isn't activated instantly when they wanted. They might have to wait a few hours.
I don't know how RIM users in other countries fared, but I had blackberry email delays for about 4 hours before it cleared up. Annoying, but not enough to make me move from Blackberry for corporate use.
Until then, I understand they could use their current phone.
Except, of course, those people that bought a new phone rather than a replacement.
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That's not quite true - the reason that RIM's network went down certainly was completely explainable, but RIM just didn't deign to explain it. I find that difference important, and it's another reason to avoid all things Blackberry for me.
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And it uses the same micro SIM card too!
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Check the status at http://www.sprint.com/bringyournumber/ [sprint.com] - if it says your port status is complete, then either do an iTunes or iCloud backup of your new phone, then go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase all Content and Settings. That will put your phone back in factory setup mode, and your phone should then get your new number. Then you can restore your backup and happiness will resume :)