Was AT&T Not iReady?
I can say that I wasn’t alone this morning when Apple and AT&T opened its doors to a line of anxious customers. In my small neck of the woods the line started out small and then grew by the minute. At 6am this morning there were 5 people on line. All who seemed to be as iReady as they possibly could.
Truth be told, that with all the iReady preparation AT&T left out some important key factors in which held up the purchase process for existing customers more so than new ones.
- Existing customers must have their bill currently up to date. Ok, I’ll give them that much. Makes perfectly good sense.
- Existing customers who have been either late more than once, or had their service suspended within the past 3-6 months cannot qualify for iPhone upgrade eligibility… no matter what customer service reps told you on the phone all those days in advance that you called.
- No overrides will be given for any inconsistencies that may appear on your account… even if its no fault of your own. To quote what I overheard from a rep, “even if they update the system we cannot override anything for the iPhone. But you can upgrade to any other phone with no problem”.
Now I know that it’s not AT&T’s fault for the delay in activation… but if they just left well enough alone and let customer’s purchase their phones and take them home and activate them at their leisure the line would have moved much faster than 30 minutes per customer (yes that long!!!). Apparently iTunes (yes the reps activate the phones via iTunes) was moving a bit slow… but who expected that, right?
According to TUAW some stores are now sending customers home to activate their phones themselves.
Overall, I can now say that “I’ve been there, done that” but I now see that there was no reason to be so eager. Tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that the iPhone 3G will still be on sale… and probably AT&T will be more iReady.
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2 Responses to “Was AT&T Not iReady?”
It was equally painful for those doing upgrades to 2.0. I know I should’ve learned from the previous gold rushes (prior version releases, SDK release, etc.), but once you’ve got the iphone fever there’s no getting away from it. So 3.5 hours later I finally had a restored phone. I’d say it was Apple that wasn’t iReady…
Comment made on July 12th, 2008 at 2:08 amHi trsills
you have a point. Apple now how many first gen iPhone’s/iPod Touch’s they sold - its not like they are guessing at how many upgrades there will be - frankly its shocking that Apple - a technology company cant get this sorted, I love Apple products but this is fundamental schoolboy stuff. I read somewhere they had all there activation servers all in one location and that they lost the line..are they crazy? No one in their right mind would put all their activation servers in one location.
Also I can not believe in this day and age retail technology can not handle something as simple as activating/ doing credit checks. Why didn’t the have an online credit check and then people just bought in the credit card/driving licence to confirm it was them..frankly if I see a press release or words coming out from at&t, O2 or Apple saying unprecedented demands they will all have very little creditability in my eyes.
Glad you got yours up and running..right now lets see if I can download ver 2.0 software for the touch and get my me.com account running!!
cheers
Rob
Comment made on July 12th, 2008 at 3:32 pmLeave a Comment