It having been the requisite 72 hours since my Verizon cellular data account had been reprovisioned on the Verizon end, I called Verizon tech support again. I asked the first tech to transfer me to the iPad specialist. After a five minute wait, a new tech came on the line. He didn’t have any of the information I’d given the first tech. I gave him the phone number of the iPad, told him that there was an active trouble ticket open, and asked him to look it up. After awhile, he found my phone record.
The tech told me that there was no record of my trouble ticket. He said that it had been “lost”. He also said that there were a lot of problems associated with the iPad 3, and that the techs were really backed up. He also said that this was a systemic “gateway problem”, and, although I couldn’t be expected to know what that meant, that it was serious, and it had Verizon’s complete attention. I refrained from passing along my credentials as an electrical engineer skilled in telephony and data networking. Instead, I asked what that meant for me. He said that, if we couldn’t resolve things during this call, that I should call Apple, and ask to swap my iPad for a new one. I never did figure out why a new iPad would make things better.
After going through the reprovisioning operations on my end and power cycling the iPad, I had brief success: I was able to download a web page. Then, that stopped, and I got a series of complaints from my iPad, including cellular data connection lost, and no SIM card. I turned off cellular data and turned it back on while the tech consulted with others. After that, I could browse the web and receive email. I even got an LTE indication at the upper left corner of the screen, and web access was pretty darn quick.
The tech said that my account was only partially set up, and that the Verizon techs would have to solve the larger problem before it could be completely provisioned. He said they’d send me an email when that happened, but to not try to reconfigure anything in the meanwhile.
Ah, life at the bleeding edge…
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