A trip to the O2 store
I was in London earlier meeting a business colleague, who’s just arrived in the country for a couple of weeks. Rather than pay his horrendously expensive roaming charges, he got hold of an O2 prepay SIM and a top-up card. So far so good.
I spoke to him last night and explained how to top-up, and he duly went down to the local corner shop, swipped the card, paid his £20 and left a happy man. However, when he came to switch on the phone this morning for the first time, it came up as ‘SIM unregistered’.
When I met up with him today, I did the usual SIM and handset swapping to make sure it wasn’t anything simple. Alas, it didn’t work. So we took a trip to one of the numerous O2 stores in Oxford Street. Hoping they could just tap a few keys and make it work, I explained his trouble, and handed over the info. ‘Sorry sir, you’ll have to speak to O2 Prepay customer services’, said the assistant, waving a cordless phone in his hands and already dialling the number. He then went off to talk to a bunch of tourists who were eyeing up an N95. About £450 without a contract, incidently, and definitely not available on prepay!
Anyway, I spoke to a very helpful customer service rep at O2. ‘Sorry sir, it appears that SIM card has expired. It’s so old we have no record of it on the system, and, well.. you know if you don’t use a prepay SIM for six months it disconnects? We could put in a reconnection order but that’ll take 24 hours at least’.
At this point, I was a little confused. I’m sure that prepay SIMs didn’t used to expire. Why could they not just reactivate it? And where had his £20 gone?
In the end we fixed it by purchasing a new SIM card (a bargain at £4.99), then typing in a rather horrendously long network code on the handset, which assigned the old top up swipe card to the new SIM card and transferred the top-up he made. Apparently if your top-up card isn’t actually assigned to a SIM card, it acts like a gift card – so the balance remains on that card. Confused? I was. But it sort of makes sense.
So, 20 minutes later, £4.99 expenditure, and the loan of an O2 in-store cordless and their sofa, and it was all sorted. However, what would have happened if someone with local knowledge of the mobile market (plus knew where the nearest O2 store was) wasn’t there? How many business people visiting the UK do the same thing, only to find they can’t get it working, or even worse have splashed a load of cash on a SIM on Ebay or made a top-up only to find their money has disappeared down a black hole?
