I currently have a Samsung SCH-a645. We purchased this phone and plan because we have a cabin in northern Colorado. We are only there about 3-4 weeks a year. At home in Michigan we use Nextel so we we don't really need a full year or even month to month plan with another service. We did have an Alltel plan -pay by month- with an old Alltel phone. The old phone worked great out there, we connected to a Union Cellular tower in Mountain View, WY, but I was paying every month for a phone I never used in Michigan. So we decided to give the pre-paid a try. We were recently in CO and message came from Union Wireless stating that we had a invalid phone and we needed to call Union Wireless for service. I called Alltel tech and tech stated that when we returned to Michigan we needed to have the phone flashed. What I really need to know is will it be guaranteed to work? We own a business at home and we need to have a functioning phone while we are there. I did change the PRL-it was on 206 - now on 606. Any help will be appreciated. Judy
I can't speak for alltel but I know cingular prepay doesn't like to roam or for that matter has very limited roaming coverage on other carriers. In southern Georgia I roamed on Tmob with while a coworker who had cingular prepay had no signal.
My husband went to local AllTel store. Stated to him what we would be using this phone for. Why did he even sell this to us? He should have known it wouldn't work. Another $100.00 plus out the door. He stated we should be free to roam out there. Why did tech state the phone needed flashing? Why will it not work on pre-pay when it will on my other AllTel monthly service plan? Thank goodness I haven't cancelled that one yet. The old monthly plan roams to Mountain View WY I had two phones at the same location. Same provider. One works-one doesn't. Naturally the one that was going to be the less costly doesn't.
It'll also work on SprintPCS ... Why cant the OP roam for $.59/min as advertised (or is this area depicted as a no service area?)
Why does the monthly Alltel plan I have roam to Union? My bill states call -then 'while in Mountain View, WY SID 01828 -which is a Union tower. Sorry I am not very wireless literate. Also the pre-paid phone had plenty of reception. The bars were as high as when in home location.
Just because you can roam off of a carrier in one area doesn't mean you can in another. It's different per Service area.
As nKrypted1 stated, the wireless cos prefer to minimize costs as much as possible and one way to do this is to restrict roaming onto other carriers. They are lenient on monthly billed accounts when it comes to roaming (but some have cracked down on it by removing these companies from the roaming database...etc)
The difference is one is pre-pay and one is post pay. This company (Union) does not have access to the pre-pay "calling card" that is tied to your account. When you roam with pre-pay on another carrier, the phone call goes to a 1-800 number behind the scenes. Then, it processes your account number, the same way a pre-pay calling card you buy at the store for land line long distance works. This is also why you may get "2-stage dialing" in some areas. Most of the smaller carriers do not have an agreement with the company that this calling card account, if you will, is held by. Since they have no access to this account, they have no way to collect money for the call. That is why you get that error message. Post pay does not have to verify and take funds on the front end. Union can simply bill alltel for the call and, depending on your plan, alltel can then bill you for it. Hope that explains it. and yes thank you for adding sprint roam, however on pre-pay there is very little sprint roaming allowed.
So in other words the plan I bought to use out there is junk to me. We got this plan three weeks ago can I be reimbursed? There is a verizon tower near Craig, CO-but is this phone strong enough to connect to it? The post paid phone always just connected to the Union tower.
no, it probably 35-40 miles from us. The Mountain View tower on post-paid is probably 100 miles from us. So I guess I will keep old phone and post paid plan. Thanks for all of your help.
I had an a645 for a day before I got my LG, and it didn't do very well on the Alltel tower six miles away. It was a slick little phone, but I wasn't impressed with its performance.
