I did the Verizon to Page
Plus porting online.
http://www.pagepluscellular.com/Online%20Store/Activate.aspx
Click the "I wanna activate a phone and port my current phone
number" and fill out the form.
Unfortunately, it was somewhat difficult getting it right.
The web form will only
accept an ESN number. Of course, one of
the phones I was trying to port (LG VX-5300) only has an MEID. It wouldn't work. I called support. They said it should work. They were wrong. So, I switched to an LG VX-8300 and blundered
onward.
The next problem was the
Verizon account number. I eventually
figured out that I had to remove the imbedded hyphen to make the form happy.
There is no indication on
the web or on the phone if the port was successful. The only clue is that when you try to make a
call with the phone, you get a Page Plus message that mumbles some
unintelligible instructions. All that
tells you is that the phone number port was successful, and that the phone
number is now registered to the Page Plus Cellular
system instead of Verizon. However, the
phone has not yet been activated or OTA (over the air) programmed.
After the unintelligible
instructions, I logged into my Page Plus account, and selected
"add/remove/edit phone". I
punched in my phone number, and then spent the next 30 minutes trying to read
the illegible security scrawl. Why this
is necessary after a successful account creation and login is beyond my limited
imagination. I was eventually instructed
to dial *22890 to program that phone.
That worked. Presumably, it also
updated the PRL.
Once the LG VX-83000 phone
was successfully added to my account, I quickly changed my password on my VZW
account. I had to give Page Plus my
account login and password, which doesn't make me feel very secure. Three weeks later, Verizon sent me a closing invoice,
in the form of an $8.07 credit. There is
no indication if I’ll ever see the money.
The Page Plus service comes
with a $2 credit towards making a test call.
I immediately bought a $25 card (6 cents per minute) and punched in the
PIN number. However, my friend with the
other phone was clueless and started using the phone as if it were an unlimited
plan. I had to talk Page Plus out of
charging him about $0.45/minute and accepting a retroactive card purchase. We settled on $0.10/minute.
Setting up voice mail was
easy. Just try to retrieve a voice mail
message (*86), and it will demand that you setup the greeting message
first. That was a real thrill while
driving on the freeway. As a
consolation, having a voice mail message with background road noise seems
rather cool.
One big difference between
Verizon and Page Plus Cellular is that you can’t
activate or switch to a different phone by yourself. Verizon allows activating most any CDMA phone
by dialing *228 and following the instructions.
Page Plus requires that you call support to change the ESN and then dial
*22890 to program it. I’m going to miss
this feature as I use it for testing CDMA phones.
If you want to do it
thyself, it's possible and worthwhile as I expect my $85/month Verizon bill to
be reduced to about $25/month. Hopefully
the above horror story will minimize any confusion. I think most of the problem was the rather
creative use of the words "activate", "port",
"register", "transfer", "enable", etc, which are
used almost interchangeably on their web pile.
Interesting reading on Page Plus Cellular:
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050602/BUSINESS03/506020389
A good
example of our government paranoia after 911. It cost the
founders $3 million to get the government off their backs even though all
agreed that they didn't do anything illegal:
"...will forfeit $3 million even
through federal prosecutors
concede the money
was neither derived from illegal activities
nor intended for
illegal purposes."