June 30, 2007 9:05 AM PDT
Big iPhone headache: Waiting for AT&T activation
Posted by Declan McCullagh
So I admit it: I bought an iPhone.
That was the easy part. But I should have realized that if the customer service whizzes at AT&T could find a way to mar what was otherwise a perfectly pleasant experience, they would. After nearly nine hours, AT&T has yet to activate my iPhone, and it can't be used until then.
Buying the iPhone is easy, but AT&T activation isn't.
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/mccullagh.org)
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Earlier on Friday, I had taken photographs of the throngs gathered outside the San Francisco Apple store at 6 p.m., and the far more sedate crowd outside the Market Street AT&T store, and then decided not to bother standing in line for an iPhone on Friday. I figured I'd read some more early reviews and then pick one up sometime in the next few days after the lines were shorter.
Other earlier reviews were promising, including one that said audio quality was superior.
Then, around 11:30 p.m., I read our News.com article by my colleagues Tom Krazit and Erica Ogg. They had stayed longer than I did and reported that: "Ninety minutes after Apple started ringing up sales of the iPhone at its 24-hour flagship store on 5th Avenue in New York, anyone could just walk into the store and pick up a device with a minimal wait."
Well, Apple stores were open until midnight, so why not? Around 11:40 p.m., I persuaded my wife to join me in a late-night dash to the Stockton Street store.
Yes, they had iPhones. Yes, the sales staff seemed exhausted after having to do crowd control earlier. Yes, there were still two San Francisco policemen standing guard outside, looking slightly bored by now. But there were only two people in line in front of me, including one desperate fellow who had driven far too fast from Marin County north of San Francisco to make the midnight deadline after finding that an Apple store up there had run out of 8GB models.
So far, so good. When I got home, I plugged the phone into our media-server iMac and typed in my information in iTunes. I received an e-mail message at 12:10 a.m. saying: "AT&T is now processing your activation. You will receive an e-mail confirmation once your activation is complete." I had an existing AT&T account, so I figured that adding the $20/month iPhone wireless plan shouldn't take too long.
Then I waited. And waited. And waited.
It's now 9:06 a.m., and still no change. Against my better judgment, I even took the God-help-me step of phoning AT&T customer support, which is something you should never do unless you're absolutely desperate and learn that some malcontent is running up calls to Zambia on your mobile account, and probably not even then.
Mary-Kay eventually answered. "Unfortunately, sir, you do have to wait," she wearily replied, apparently sick of having to answer this question about once a minute since her shift began. "The iPhone will tell you when it is activated."
How long would this take, I asked. Five days? Two months? "I doubt that," Mary-Kay replied. "Believe you me, you're not the only one in those shoes. They did get jammed up last night. It's first-come first-served."
I began to ask her if my existing Cingular phone would continue to work, but the line seemed to go dead. It could be my sucky VoIP service, or Mary-Kay could have simply hung up on me. I really wouldn't blame her for being sick of dealing with frustrated iPhone customers all day.
Now, I've been a computer programmer longer than I've been a journalist, and I find it hard to imagine any system that should take nearly nine hours to perform a database query, do a credit check, and whatever other black box magic is necessary to make this thing work. It's even less likely that the system should take this long in the middle of the night after the East Coast iPhone binge-and-registration should, in theory, be complete. And I'm already an AT&T customer, even.
Any bets on how long it'll take AT&T to activate this guy's iPhone?
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/mccullagh.org)
Occam's razor suggests that the more likely explanation is that AT&T has such antiquated computers that some poor saps in another secret AT&T division somewhere are keystroking in my account update by hand. Seriously. We may never know, but I can believe it.
I'm hardly alone. Some reports indicate AT&T activation is a recurring problem. One local Fox news channel article is titled "iPhone debuts with big headaches." A LiveJournal user entry buttresses my theory by reporting that the AT&T "transfer team" gets in to work at 9 a.m. PDT.
There's speculation that existing AT&T SIM cards may work with the iPhone, but I haven't tried that yet. Some posts in that thread are saying AT&T is telling customers they need to wait for 24 hours because of high volume. Some people are saying that their existing AT&T phones become unusable during the transition, though that hasn't happened to me so far.
It's important to stress that the iPhone can't be used for anything useful, not even playing music or movies, until activation happens.
The bottom line? Apple did everything it could to ensure that buying and setting up (and presumably using, though I can't attest to that yet) an iPhone is a pleasant experience. It succeeded magnificently.
But its key business partner, AT&T, has failed just as miserably. Computer companies know how to load-test a server to figure out how it will respond under unusually high demand for its services. Why didn't AT&T do the same for its iPhone activation?
