Tommy Collison

Meteor are my mobile service provider, just like Vodafone, o2 or AT&T

In some ways, they’re good, like offering free any network texts if you top up by 20 euro every 28 days. Since most of my calls are to Mom, Dad or John are “Hi, you on your way?”, which equal about 7 seconds in total, I invariably have a lot left over which usually goes to data. Data is using the internet on my phone, by the way.

Data, for me, consists of 50 MBs per day, costing me 99c. I can use up to the 50, and it won’t cost me more than a euro. It’s completely out of contract, meaning it only gets charged the days I’m using it.

I had it all set up on my iPhone. The first day I got the settings (you need a web address that the iPhone can access, plus a username and password) was the day after my iPhone arrived. I was in Dublin with Alan Costello and Cian McMahon (who does a spectacular podcast called View from the Quad, incidentally).

I call them up, navigate my way through their rat’s maze of an automated answering system, every avenue of which leads to the same place, talking with a customer care person. (Press # at the start to get to the end quicker). I give them my number, name, address and PIN code.

“Okay Mr. Collison, how may I help you?”

I ask politely if they could tell me the settings for accessing Meteor’s WAP settings.

“What phone you running?”

I reply that no, I wanted to do it manually, could they just tell them to me.

“Oh now I couldn’t do that, you have to tell me”

an iPhone, 1st generation.

“We don’t support them.”

*Hangs up*

Ehh, thanks. I call them up again and meet similarly frosty attitudes to my choice of telephone. I tried to tell them that these things did work on iPhones, but they seemed not to hear. How professional.

By hanging up, I’d usually be connected to a different person each time, and I’d be met with a different reaction. Eventually, I got through to someone who was willing to actually tell me the settings over the phone. Thanks, Phil.

Fast forward 3 months to Sunday evening, when I discovered I could upgrade to 3.0 without locking up my phone. Just in case I cocked up, I decided to do it on my old iPhone with the broken screen, just to make sure I did it right.

I did it and got it working with old iPhone, so it was time to plug in my current one and upgrade that. I did, and it went smoothly, and I’m loving 3.0 and all, but I noticed that my EDGE settings had been deleted. Time for a call to Meteor!

Exact same story.

“Yeah, we don’t support Apple phones”

I tell them calmly that they do, as mine was working before I upgraded. Cue me hanging up on them to talk to someone different. Eventually, I got through to someone and just said I needed the settings for my Nokia 5310, and they gave it to me. They were the exact same settings.

So, Meteor, please, you do support iPhones. Please try and be more helpful. Love, Tommy.