T-mobile Simcard Hibernating

[dragon]

I had a prepaid t-mobile data (mobile broadband) sim that I'd not used for a fair few months.

Went to use it and was expecting to connect and then get a captive portal asking me to top-up (which is what usually happens if it's out of credit)

I'd get mobile coverage, but when I tried to bring up the PPP session it would instantly get dropped with an error "the other end refused the connection"

Even topping up the sim-card didn't work (Did it online via another connection)

What I actually had to do in the end was call t-mobile who were able to see that the simcard was "Hibernating" and reset it.

They did advice it could take upto 24hours to be usable again, however in reality it was working almost straight away, just had to remove/reinsert the dongle (Presumably it checks something on registration of the cell and needed a forced re-registration)

Once that was working I moved the sim back into the Mi-fi That I usually use it with (and which seems to have either a better radio or antenna or perhaps both as it works in places the dongle has trouble with)

They did also call back later to confirm that the reset had worked, which I thought was pretty good.


Anyway I thought I'd post this just incase anyone else runs into a similar problem with an account they've not used in a while.

It had me looking for a configuration issue my end for quite a while as the sim would still register with the network and still reported having the number assigned but couldn't establish a data session also my phone was getting a data session ok and it's also on t-mobile.