T-Mobile Officially Supports Unlocked iPhones

After a voicemail service upgrade, people using unlocked iPhones on T-Mobile started to receive blank text messeges instead of proper VoiceMail notification. These text messages were not free and the customers were being charged for them. A guy emailed T-Mobile about the problem and received a very positive response in return. John qoutes:

T-mobile recently changed some aspect of their voicemail system, which cause iPhones (and some other unlocked non T-mobile branded phones) on their network to FREAK OUT. You’d get blank text messages from the future (2012!) when people left voicemails, and calling voicemail caused a flurry of the blank texts to arrive. These were notably NOT free texts either, so you were being charged per message if you didn’t have an unlimited plan. Some iPhone users on T-mobile’s network e-mailed Executive Customer Service, and got a very nice phone call in response, acknowledging the problem and awarding a 1-month service credit.

The T-mo rep stated that “T-Mobile, though they do not offer the iPhone, and that they are committed to supporting users on their network who have them.”

Sure enough, within a day or so, in response to the problem, a T-mobile Tier 2 service rep posted an acknowledgment of the problem in a hackintosh forum, and indicated they’d fixed the issue.

All in all, this cements my loyalty to T-mobile. Even without officially supporting a particular phone, they are willing to make accommodations to ensure the iPhone users on their network continue to enjoy good service. And, it is worth noting, can continue to do so for tens of dollar less per month than they would if they were still using a 2G iPhone on AT&T.

And here’s what the T-Mobile Employee Steven has written on the Hackintosh Forum:

Hello,

Steven with T-Mobile here in an unofficial capacity. I was just alerted to this issue today. I was able to replicate this with my own iPhone after moving myself to a different voicemail server.

The issue was the voicemail notification that was being sent out. It was going through a new component that was causing it to send as an SMS instead of a VM notification.

We’ve corrected it. You should only get a proper VM notification (red dot) when you actually get a VM from now on.

Long live the iPhone and let’s all pray for a fully unlocked iPhone 3G with a 1700 Mhz band… :-)

-Steven

Thumbs up T-Mobile! I hope Apple will not claim judicial trail against you! :)

Via The Consumerist