The PrePaid iPhone in Illinois 1.1.3 saga heads to Day 3

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Let me apologize to the readers, members, and supporters of Boycott Chapter 27. I'm sorry to have stepped away from the normal topic of conversation on this blog, but it's the biggest forum I have for telling the current iPhone saga.
Unfortunately, I am anything but a professional writer, but hopefully this will clear up some of the questions people are having regarding their prepaid iPhone after the 1.1.3 update.

Headed to Day 3:

Apple Store to AT&T Customer Care to AT&T technical services to AT&T Billing to AT&T iPhone specialist to AT&T customer care.

This has now taken the majority of my 2nd day attempting to "get back to my business" in my latest iPhone saga.

This is what I have learned:
It seems, from what I've been told from AT&T, this issue has only happened to iPhone prepay customers in Illinois and possibly Wisconsin. Shame on me for not wanted to be locked in to a 2 year contract. Guess I should have been beholden to AT&T for the next 24 months.

All of the Data and Texting plans on prepaid iPhone accounts in the IL. data center have been deleted. According to my last phone call to an AT&T customer care supervisor, the software engineers are working on a fix to have the plans reinstated by tomorrow morning. They will be running a software update tonight (I HOPE).

I will say all the folks at the AT&T call center have been very nice, but at some point "nice", just doesn't help. As I have explained to the folks at Apple, iPhones are not just fancy iPods, they have become a business critical device. I have lost 2 full days of text messages and have not had the ability to access email or the internet, this directly impacts my livelyhood.

For about 46 of the last 48 hours, I have had no data or text messaging functionality, when they did come back, they wiped out my $50+ balance in a matter of minutes (which was replaced by AT&T, without much of a fight). Problem was, I was unaware that my balance had been "used" and was left unable to make or receive phone calls, on what was at that point nothing more than my very large touch screen cell phone.

Billing wanted me to prepay for a new month starting today, essentially losing the 13 days of unlimited text and data which I had already payed for. Not a good solution.
The technical folks, again nicely, have transfered me to iPhone specialists, customer care, and billing. Billing transfered me to customer care again. Anthony at customer care finally got me a supervisor who explained the issue, saying "by tomorrow morning you will be up and running".

As I type, I am continuously getting hit with $.01 charges, what am I paying a penny for??

Hope this helped answer some of your questions, I am interested to know if this is affecting people outside of Illinois. Please Post a comment of this is the case or if you have any additional info.

And please refer to my last posting, before you call me an Apple basher, as I own a few shares of both Apple and AT&T stock.
And as a side-note, I didn't just buy this iPhone, I got it as a loyal employee of Apple. (and Left on Very good terms, thank you very much)
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iPhone 3G ANNOUNCED - RELEASED 7/11
The pre-paid iPhone 2.0

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