Cell – Hicken Design

A few years ago I wrote a post on using the iPhone with Consumer Cellular. A lot of people commented on it so in this post, I’ll sum it up for people looking to use this excellent priced voice and data service on the excellent iPhone or iPad!

1. Is this Right For Me?

If you expect technical support from your cell phone provider for your phone (the actual device), this is probably not a good idea for you. The moment you tell Consumer Cellular that you are using an iPhone or an iPad, they will likely tell you that they cannot provide support. If you are ok with this, I lower my staff of warning and allow you to pass into a world of greater freedom. After over 2 years of using an iPhone with Consumer Cellular, I’ve never had to call them for support on anything except to enable my data plan (see step 4).

You must have a GSM (the AT&T version) iPhone or iPad for this to work. How do you check? Look for the sim card tray on the top or on the side of the device. It will have a small pin hole used to eject the tray.

2. The Sim Card

If you are planning to use the iPad, or the iPhone 4 or newer, you’ll need to cut your sim card down to the size of a micro sim card. There are plenty of articles on the web about how to do that. I won’t cover it here because it’s quite easy to do.

3. Voice and Text

The good news is that you don’t need to jailbreak or unlock your iPhone or iPad to use it on Consumer Cellular! Their service rides on AT&T’s network. ~~so devices automatically activate when the sim card is inserted~~. You may need to connect to iTunes the first time you activate your device. But after that, Voice and Text (SMS) just work. If you desire to get data working you’ll need to take a few more steps. If you don’t care about data, you’re done!

4. Enable Data with Consumer Cellular

If you purchased a Consumer Cellular phone that supports data, you can skip this step. If not, your sim card needs to be provisioned for data. Basically, Consumer Cellular needs to flip a switch on their end to activate data for you. Login to the Consumer Cellular website to see if this is already done for you.

After you login, click the Change Services link on the right side of the page.

Scroll down a bit to the “Messaging and Data” section. If data is enabled for your sim card the Data (Web) checkbox will be checked.

If you previously used a Consumer Cellular phone that didn’t support data or it does not appear to be activated on their website, you can call customer service (1-888-345-5509) and let them know that you’ve purchased a used AT&T phone which supports data and ask them to enable data for your sim card. ~~If you tell them it is an iPhone/iPad you will likely be denied.~~ Since the original writing of this article, Consumer Cellular has begun reselling the iPhone 3G so there should be no issues here but it may take a day or so for the provisioning to go into effect.

5. Enable Data on Your iDevice

The easiest way to enable data is to visit unlockit.co.nz from Safari on your iPad or iPhone. Note that the site looks very different on a desktop so you have to visit it from your iDevice. When you browse to the site, you’ll find that it’s a simple step-by-step wizard. We’re going to change your APN or Access Point Name to the correct address for Consumer Cellular.

Open the site on your iDevice and select Custom APN to change the address of your data network.

Select Consumer Cellular as the carrier and then tap Email Profile.

Enter your iPhone or iPad email address and tap Email the Profile. This email must be opened on your iDevice to continue.

Open the email that was sent to you and tap the settings.mobileconfig attachment.

Tap Install to install this profile and update your APN.

After the profile is successfully installed, you may need to toggle airplane mode on and then back off again. Do this from from the Settings app (Settings > Airplane Mode). In some instances you will need to power down your iDevice completely and then power it back up.

Should you ever need to uninstall the profile, you can find it in the Settings app (Settings > General > Profile).

Ensure that you’ve enabled data in the Settings app (Settings > General > Network). Turn on Enable 3G and Cellular Data. If you are in an area where the 3G network is not good, you should still be able to use the old Edge network by disabling 3G. It is much slower but also consumes less power.

You can test your cellular data by disabling Wi-Fi (Settings > Wi-Fi > Wi-Fi).

6. MMS

At this point, everything should be working except for MMS (Picture and Video messaging). Unfortunately this is where things get more complicated. If you wish to enable MMS, your iDevice must be jailbroken and you will need to install the appropriate version of the CommCenter Patch. Then you will need to manually update the remainder of the data network profile settings in your Carrier.plist file. You can find more information on this topic at my previous post.

7. Consider a donation

I hope this post saves you a lot of money on your cell phone service! Leave a comment and let us know about your experience with Consumer Cellular on your iDevice!

If this saves you money, please consider donating. This will allow us to continue to provide quality content.

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Read this first: This post is somewhat dated so I’ve written a follow-up post that could save you a lot of time if you just want a quick way to set up your iPhone or iPad on Consumer Cellular.

As you read on, you’ll see that this was a discovery process for me. I took several steps that weren’t really necessary. So try this first…

Make sure your iPhone is jailbroken. Read up at the iPhone Dev Team blog for more info on jailbreaking.
Update your AT&T carrier bundle to allow APN editing. You will need an SFTP application such as Cyberduck (mac) or Filezilla (PC) to connect in and see the files on your iPhone. Connect to root@youriPhoneIPaddress using the user name root and the password alpine (unless you’ve already changed the root password – which you should do if you haven’t already). Inside the AT&T carrier bundle, there is a file named carrier.plist. It is located here… /System/Library/Carrier Bundles/ATT_US.bundle/carrier.plist. It contains a property named “AllowEDGEEditing” which is a bool (true/false) property. If that property is not in the file, you can manually add it using the Apple plist editor (part of the Apple developer tools – a free download). I’m sure there are free plist editors for the PC as well. Note that this file must be saved in the same format that you found it (binary). Don’t try to save it as a plain text XML file. It won’t work. If you are using an editor other than the Apple plist editor you’ll need to make sure it supports binary when saving. After editing this file, go to Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network and enter the consumer cellular APN, MMSC, MMS Proxy and MMS UA Prof URL.

That’s it. If that doesn’t work for you, read on…

Here is what your carrier.plist might look like…

Discovery Process (don’t do this stuff unless you know what you are doing):
Finally after almost 2 years with an iPhone on Consumer Cellular I figured out how to get their data plan working! It took a great deal of hacking at carrier bundles. By default Consumer Cellular uses the AT&T bundle but for some reason it does not use the AT&T carrier name on screen. I haven’t figured that one out yet. At any rate, this is pretty kickin’ because Consumer Cellular is cheap and you don’t have to unlock your phone for them to work! On the flip side you do have to jailbreak to do this hack.

I’m uploading my AT&T bundle so that you don’t have to go through all the work but you might have to anyway since there are signatures in the carrier.plist file. I’m not sure if those are tied to the phone or not. Here are the files…

Consumer Cellular Custom .ipcc (I really don’t think you need this)
Consumer Cellular Custom AT&T bundle
ATT_US.bundle (4.3.1)

There’s definitely an easier way but this worked for me…

Custom Consumer Cellular carrier bundle (I don’t think you need to do this part)…

Used the carrier bundle generator website to create a bundle using the listed Consumer Cellular APN and MMS settings**.
Installed carrier bundle via iTunes as recommended by the carrier bundle generator website.
Using SFTP, copied everything in /var/mobile/Library/Carrier Bundles/ (including ConsumerCellular_custom.bundle) to my desktop. This serves as a backup in case something goes wrong.
Deleted everything in /var/mobile/Library/Carrier Bundles/
Copied ConsumerCellular_custom.bundle to /System/Library/Carrier Bundles/

Custom AT&T carrier bundle…

Using SFTP, copied /System/Library/Carrier Bundles/ATT_US.bundle to my desktop.
Opened carrier.plist from inside the AT&T bundle on my desktop with the Apple plist editor and added settings that were in the Consumer Cellular bundle but not in this one. I also updated the name of the provider and MMS proxy URL. Download the custom AT&T bundle and compare it to yours to see what all I changed.
Copied ATT_US.bundle from my desktop back to /System/Library/Carrier Bundles/.
Restarted the phone.

Note that you can use SBSettings to check if you have a “Data IP Address” on the Edge network. If this is helpful leave me a comment and let me know of your success!

**Consumer Cellular’s listed APN and MMS settings…

Service Name	MMS	Web
Proxy Address	proxy.mvno.ccmobileweb.com	<blank>
Proxy Port	80	<blank>
Proxy Push	Disabled	Enabled
Authentication Type	Secure	Secure
Username (CSD/GPRS)	<blank>	<blank>
Password (CSD/GPRS)	<blank>	<blank>
GPRS access point	att.mvno	att.mvno
Homepage	http://mmsc.cingular.com	http://mmsc.cingular.com

UPDATE:

It appears that after running this for 2 days, Consumer Cellular is not tracking my data usage. Perhaps the hacked carrier bundle is causing the iPhone to bypass their servers and go straight to AT&T? Or perhaps they are tracking it but it’s not being reflected on their website since they still think I’m using an old Nokia phone and the data option is grayed out? It took a while to show up but they are tracking it.
I noticed that in order to get data working I must disable WIFI, data and the phone components. Then enable phone, then edge. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to turn on.
I later enabled this on my old 3G running iOS 3.1.3. All I had to do was add the “AllowEDGEEditing” bool property to the beginning of the carrier.plist file inside the AT&T bundle. Then I went to Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network and entered the consumer cellular APN, MMSC, MMS Proxy and MMS UA Prof URL.
Since I originally updated my carrier bundle, the plain text APN settings that I added have been converted to “data” entries encoded using a signature (most likely specific to my phone). You’ll see this in the plist if you download the second file listed above. I’m not sure how to generate these signatures but I suppose you could just remove them from the file and then manually add the APN settings again. Perhaps new signatures will be generated for your iPhone after doing so?