Imessage & Facetime not working after porting - support experience lacking.

Question

I recently ported two numbers to ID from EE. I have the “stuck validating” issue for facetime and iMessage as reported by many other users. I’ve tried every piece of advice offered in the many threads I’ve read through.I’ve seen this before. When I ported my numbers from BT mobile to EE a few years ago, it took about 5 hours to resolve itself, so I know it’s a network thing and it’s usually sorts itself out.I’m nearly 48 hours in to this with ID so it should have sorted itself out by now.Steps taken from reading all of the related threads.I’ve deleted and re-added my eSIM,	all other SIMs are deleted (my old EE sim was also eSIM).	I’ve reset and refreshed the network settings,	I’ve turned off these services and turned them back on, rebooted and various combinations of this.	I’ve rebooted about 30 times, with and without WIFI, to use cellular data.	I’ve checked to make sure my number is shown correctly (it is).	I’ve logged in and out of my Apple services and rebooted.	I’ve waited 24 hours and repeated these steps.	I’ve chatted to ID Mobile support via the chat function - my word, that was an experience...I wanted to say something about chat support.I can only describe the ID Mobile chat support process as unhelpful and a frustrating waste of my time. A conversation that could have taken 5 minutes, took over an hour as I had to wait for 5 or 6 (sometimes 10) minutes between each simple response. This wasn’t deep technical stuff, every response had a 5 or 6 minute delay, at one time, I was waiting for a reply and the Chat person was like “I haven’t heard from you in a while, do you want to continue.?” I was waiting for them to reply to the previous information I had provided to them. Shockingly bad.I then got a bunch of copy and paste replies telling me to do the things that I had already told them I had done. One even said “Ask the customer if they have tried turning their WIFI on and off”, this was right after I told the agent I’d done this. I mean, this is just copy and paste from a script. The agent had no clue about even the most basic things and some of the questions were nonsensical.I was then asked for examples of messages that failed. So for context, the agent wanted examples of messages that failed, on a service that’s not active? does that even make sense? (maybe it does but I couldn’t get him to explain what he was trying to get).I then got a text saying a complaint had been logged. I didn’t make a complaint, I asked for the issue to be escalated. This wasted an hour and a half. I would have been better off using a carrier pidgeon for this conversation.Before attempting the chat support, I spoke to Apple support. They did a bunch of checks (I knew the checks wouldn’t find anything as I have the identical problem on both ported lines). Apple confirmed that the issue is not on my device or their side, and that it’s with the network operator. I communicated that in my glacial speed conversation with the agent, but it was ignored.This has been going on for more than 24 hours and I’m unsure on what else to do, other than port my numbers to another network. Interestingly it only affects the 2 numbers that I ported, the 3rd number I added (fresh number for my son), just worked and validated in seconds. I assume it’s because it wasn’t ported.The other family numbers that I was planning to port, will not be ported. Honestly, this was such a poor experience.

WelshPaul · Answer

This issue arises for many people when porting their numbers across different networks.iMessage and FaceTime are Apple services, they should be providing you with support.

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