cell phone internet disconnected temporarily
This might be the work of a cell phone virus, a mobile virus. It not only disabled Internet access on my phone, it also disabled one of my colleages.
At 8/11/05, 7:50am, I received an SMS text message on my PalmOne Treo 650 smartphone from “907” with the text of “OTA OK”. Since that time, I cannot retrieve email, I cannot send email, I cannot browse on the Internet, and I cannot send SMS nor MMS messages. When I try to connect up to mobile Internet via GPRS, I did notice a different pattern in the initalization. It now says something like “Connecting to T-Mobile VPN”. It did not do that before. After some failed handshakes, the resulting error message is “Unable to Establish PPP Connection.” I tried a soft reset, and that did not fix it. I just got back to my hotel, and sync’d up my data. So now I’m going to try a hard reset.
Nope, that didn’t work either. I’m not sure I want to do a zero-out; maybe I have to. When I re-sync’d my backup info onto the Treo 650, it came up with this error message.
– Already exists: c:\palm\treo650\backup\ConnectionMgr50DB.PDB
Hmm, maybe that’s the virus infected file…
I loved having unlimited mobile Internet, getting to moblog and check email at will anywhere and anytime. It was working great. Now, even cell phones (smartphones anyways) seem to be vulnerable to viruses. As I find out more info, I’ll let you know here.
[update 8/14/05] After what seemed like over an hour on customer service and technical support, being transferred from department to department, I finally got an answer to my situation. Somehow, for some unknown reason, my cell phone’s mobile internet service was turned off, removed from my account. The phone does not belong to my name, but rather to a department of my employer. While I don’t have authorization to all of the account, I have partial access to certain services, and was able to get my mobile internet reactivated. It’d take another 24-48 hours to reactivate.
I received another “OTA OK” text message on my cell phone while talkin with tech support. I told them about this text message. They explained that this short SMS text message is to notify T-Mobile customers of an account change. Oh, that’s a relief! It would be a lot more helpful if the text message sent was something like: “your mobile account settings has been changed” instead of “OTA OK” – just a suggestion. Now, a day later, I’ve got mobile internet access again.
