Just wanted to share with you my amazing first day on Public Mobile!
I'm a fresh transplant to Canada, in Halifax for a few days to rent a house and register a Canadian phone number before I run back to the US to wrap up affairs. Having a Canadian phone number was especially important since we need to contact the immigration office about some additional steps related to our permanent residency, and they require a Canada area code.
A friend in Toronto recommended Public Mobile and I was happy to give her the referral. I picked up a SIM at Walmart but skipped setup for later as I was in a rush at the time.
Since I don't have a Canadian credit card yet I went to Shoppers that night and asked for a "payment voucher" -- and got confused looks. Multiple retail staff in different stores thought I was asking for a money order and told me to wait till Canada Post was open. I only learned the next day back at a Walmart mobile counter that I should have been asking for a prepaid top-up slip; the documentation I've seen on Public Mobile's site seems unclear on this. I purchased a $60 voucher.
I started activation and selected a $50 plan that includes Canada/US calling and 3G data. Activation process went smoothly until I got to payment: after I submited the voucher PIN, the site froze. After several minutes of nonactivity I refreshed the payment page and tried submitting again. Same result. My phone then chimed and showed me an SMS with a PIN code that was different from the PIN I had specified on the activation form.
It seemed the SIM had been activated during the timeout so I went to log in to my account with the username and password I had specified in activation. Login failed. Again, maybe I entered password wrong? Login failed.
I tried creating an account to see if I'd missed a step due to not reaching the last page of the Activation process. Registration sent me two confirmation messages each with a different authentication code. Only the first one worked.
On login I was presented with an angry "account suspended for nonpayment" box that said to disregard if I had actually paid, and my "amount due" was $0. However when I tried to make a call, I received a recorded suspension notice. Mobile internet was blocked. Quite a welcome to the service.
I tried the "phone lost/found" workaround and that successfully removes the suspension. I tried calling my wife in the US and received a new error message recording stating that I needed a long distance addon -- even though I had US calling enabled. I tried calling a Canadian number and got the same message -- even though this was not a long distance call.
I logged back into my selfserve account and the "amount due" had suddenly changed to $40.
I went to the Community site to register an account. The first two tries, the registration form timed out and returned security certificate errors. Finally I got in and tried to submit a mod message -- and got more timeouts.
I slept on it. This morning the phone actually [kind of] works for Canadian calls, still tells me US calls will incur long distance charges, and lets me use the internet -- but my "amount due" has changed to $20. It should be zero until 8 Dec.
I need to add roaming before I head back to the US in 2 days (I'm back and forth a lot till Dec) but my balances keep changing on the selfserve site and I worry I'll break something else when I do the add-on. Do I really want to stay with a buggy service that can't even give me base-level reliability and welcomes a new customer with an undeserved suspension? This was just the first day.
Update: my "amount due" is now $30. Why does it keep changing?
