Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Consumer Cellular - Android phone configuration for LTE and MMS (December 2014)

Problem: Your phone does voice, text, and maybe non-LTE data, but LTE and MMS don't work.

Quick Solution: DO NOT use an existing APN entry for your CC configuration. Use the "+" button to create a brand new APN entry and put in just the required values. Editing existing values, such as selecting or typing something, then deleting it, appears to leave troublesome remnants. Probably there are values that need to be null rather than blank, and once you touch them, they are saved as blank and cause the config to fail. By creating a fresh APN, you prevent that problem. Here's my working configuration, found in a thread on Howard Forums but an almost identical configuration can be found on the CC web site.

You must also be sure to select the new APN as the active one, exit, then check to be sure it sticks, and finally, best practice includes shutting down and restarting the phone after making these changes. I even go to the point of briefly removing the battery, but that might well be superstition.





The full story...

My wife and I switched from ATT ($140/mo, three phones) to Consumer Cellular ($60/mo, three phones) about a year ago.

I love the fact that we still have ATT service and national coverage. It is exceedingly rare for us to find ourselves without coverage in our US travels, except in situations where there is no cell coverage at all, such as in remote areas of the west, far from towns and major highways. On a bike trip a couple of years back, we found ourselves in Jeffrey City, WY...



... where I had coverage on ATT, but my riding buddy had zilch on Verizon. Because I do trips like that one with some frequency, nationwide coverage, including in the boonies, is pretty important to me. That rules out T-Mobile and Sprint, along with MVNO's that depend on their infrastructure.

In addition to the coverage, I love the fact that there is no contract, and that I can change my plan right up to the last day of the month to get the best rate for my usage that month. We work from home, so my usage of mobile date is usually quite low, except when actually traveling or doing MMS. My wife and I rarely go through 300 MB in a month, but when we do, Consumer Cellular lets me know that we are near or over our chosen plan's allowance, so I can change the data plan to the next higher level on their web site. The only thing that could be better is if they automatically changed the plan for me, essentially giving me the best rate for my usage without the need for any manual intervention.

So, great coverage, and great price, but there has been one fly in the ointment -- getting our phones properly configured. We have three phones, including an old flip phone that just sits at home and anchors our old home phone number so the solicitors have a number to call. These calls get forwarded to our household Google Voice number which sends us text and/or email notifications. Our friends and family know to call our mobiles, which are both Samsung Galaxy S3's. Kathy is running the stock Samsung flavor of Android on hers; I have used the wonderful Cyanogen installer to convert my phone to Cyanogen 11, a vast improvement over the crapware-infested Samsung factory Android.

To take an ATT phone to Consumer Cellular or to use an alternate SIM when outside the US, you must "unlock" your phone. ATT is pretty obliging on that score, as long as your phone is no longer on contract, or you pay the early termination fee. By definition, that will be the case if you are switching to another carrier. Anyway, once unlocked, you give the IMEI number to the nice support folks at CC and they register the phone. If you have an LTE-capable phone, be sure to let them know that you want LTE set on their end. They might not set you up in their system for LTE unless you remind them, making configuration more confusing or sticking you with lower 3G and HSPA data rates.

Initially, with the help of a second-level support person at CC, I got both of our phones configured. After switching from stock Samsung Android to Cyanogen, however, I found that I no longer had LTE, or perhaps I never did have LTE on CC, but I didn't notice. I fiddled with the settings unsuccessfully every so often, but in truth my data use doesn't need anything beyond HSPA, which was working fine, so getting LTE to work on my phone was a low priority tech challenge more than a necessity. More recently, my wife dropped her phone, cracking the display in the corner that took the impact. Initially, it seemed to be a cosmetic issue and she was willing to live with it. A week or two later, however, the microphone in the phone quit working. Short of using a headphone all the time, she could not make phone calls or use voice commands. I found a new, sealed box, unlocked ATT Galaxy S3 on eBay for a good price and replaced her phone with the new one. Of course, that meant that we had to register the new phone with CC, and get it configured. Voice, fine. SMS texting, fine. Data, HSPA, but no LTE. MMS, total FAIL.

I spent a couple of nights trying to duplicate the settings on my phone, which was working with the exception of LTE data. Nothing I did seemed to get MMS to work. Finally I noticed a caution in one of the forum posts about the need to get CC support to enable LTE on their end. I gave them a call, and sure enough, it was not enabled for either of our S3's. That done, I again changed the APN settings to match what I was seeing online (see the two links at the top of this post). No dice. I was about to admit defeat and call CC support again, but my eyes finally caught sight of a step in another forum post that specifically said you must create a new APN rather than edit an existing one. Once I did that, everything quickly started working as it should. LTE appears in the notification bar, and MMS messages go to and from both the phones!