Bought a phone for my mom, sign up for Public Mobile 9 days ago. Worked well until this morning. Every time calling from her phone ended up with a message saying she doesn't have long distance in her plan, and it is a local call.
Here are three troubleshooting techniques that will fix many common issues with a phone when certain features/services aren't working properly, consistently or stop working altogether.....
Reboot your phone. (Power off phone. Wait 5 min. Power on again.)
Turn airplane mode on. Wait 5 min. Turn airplane mode off. This is especially helpful for connectivity issues. It completely disconnects you from the network and then reestablishes with a better/stronger network connection.
Lost/stolen trick. Log into your account. Report phone lost. Log out. Wait 5 min. Log in. Report phone found. Log out. Reboot phone. This disconnects the SIM card from public mobile. Stopping your service from working. It can be used if #2 doesn't work or for troubleshooting account related issues. It can force your account to take or register a payment from your balance after autopay or renewal failures. Also used when all calls go to voicemail or to secretly get your kids off their phone because it stops working for them. Lol!
Try these methods to solve issues....if they don't work you can still ask the community for help and/or contact the moderators if the problem still can't be solved. We're always happy to help.
We all came here for the rates. The support is all online and via this system. The people responding here are customers like you. The way to deal with company support people is to use the SIMon chatbot to contact what they call the moderators.
Answer some of the questions and ideas posed and we can further help you. Sometimes one reply can have several ideas in it. Try to go through them.
Edit: @etmomphone Two things to try: 1. Try the lost/stolen feature. Log in to self-serve. Plan & Add-Ons from top menu. Lost/Stolen Phone from next menu. Suspend Service button. Log out. Wait a few minutes. Log back in and back to Lost/Stolen Phone and Resume Service this time. Log out. Restart phone. See what happens.
2. Manually add $1 into your account and restart the phone.
Do you still see at least the $5 you paid in attempting to buy the add-on?
Do you see the add-on listed down in your data & add-ons area?
Buying add-ons is a bit non-intuitive. It looks like you're going about buying it but the first step is just adding money. Then you need to go back and buy the add-on itself.
If you are on the $15 plan, you will eat up your outgoing minutes by checking voicemail from your phone. Use another phone to check your voicemail by dialing your number and pressing * during the greeting. Also all outgoing calls are rounded up to the nearest minute. You can use self-service to monitor your usage.
@etmomphone which plan did you get? If you got the $15 plan, it has limited minutes. If this is the case please purchase a calling add-on, $5 for 500 minutes.
@etmomphone Try to re-insert the sim and restart her phone. Can you call her number? Can she call your number now? Try to add +1 in front of the number. Usually, this message can be simply ignored, and the call goes through.
