gdgt

So, I have a bit of a story to tell...

I preordered my Galaxy Nexus in early November of last year and received it in early December. My previous phone was an iPhone 4, and after a harrowing 30 minutes trying to get my microSIM + adapter unjammed from the SIM card slot in the Galaxy Nexus, I realized I had to head to my local AT&T store. I had a normal experience - walked in, told them I needed to activate a new device and needed a new SIM card, and it was all pretty efficient (minus the representative fondling my seemingly sparkling device that he had never seen before).

Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me at the time, AT&T's systems do not recognize the Galaxy Nexus as a "4G" device (mind you, I'm using 4G in quotations here to denote that AT&T's 4G isn't actual 4G), but instead just saw it as a regular smartphone. As such, my new SIM card was provisioned with a standard 3G data plan. Once I finished setting up the device over the next couple of days, I began reading the XDA Developers forum about the Nexus. There were a couple posts listing AT&T's "4G" APNs (Access Point Names) that you could manually plug into the device to magically receive better speeds. Of course I tried this, but my phone was never able to connect with these new APNs. I read a couple of pages later in the thread that you had to have a specifically provisioned SIM card in order to access these faster APNs.

I looked at the data plan I was signed up for, and lo and behold it was not the one I needed to achieve these mystical blazing speeds everyone was raving about. That night I tried AT&Ts online chat (which was not helpful in the slightest) and then tried calling AT&T customer support by dialing 611 on my phone. No one had even a modicum of understanding about what I was trying to accomplish, so I gave up.

I tried to justify to myself that I am almost always on WiFi and didn't really need the increased speed, but it kept weighing on my mind that I was missing out on the full experience I deserve. So, earlier this morning I took the plunge and unlocked my bootloader and manually uploaded to 4.0.2, (something and I had been wanting to do for some time) and although this has nothing to do with being provisioned for 4G, it served as the impetus for me to stick it out and bombard customer service over and over until I succeeded.

I started with a game plan - I went onto the technical support chat and tried as many times as I could to explain to each CS rep what I was trying to accomplish. I went through three support "specialists" before it wouldn't allow me to connect to chat anymore. Then I started on the phone, and went through four people before I reached someone who understood what I was trying to do. He wasn't familiar with the device, but he was at least willing to try the method I had read about.

I explained to him my situation and told him that everything I had read said that we needed to pretend that I was activating an actual 4G phone on my line as an upgrade by using an IMEI number from one of their 4G phones - an Atrix 4G, Inspire 4G, Infuse 4G, etc... Everything I read said that he should have been able to just pull an IMEI from their database and use that, but he said he didn't have those powers, and asked me if I had an IMEI number for one of these phones. Luckily, I came prepared.

So, it turns out that for each phone, the first eight digits of an IMEI number are the same across all of the phones, and the next six can be completely made up. For the Atrix 4G, the first eight are 35364804. IMEIs follow something called the Luhn Algorithm (en.wikipedia.org­/wiki­/Luhn­_algorithm) and all you have to do to generate an IMEI for an Atrix 4G is choose six random numbers and add them to the end of those first eight. Then, add each of the numbers together to get the sum of those 14 numbers. Take this number and multiply it by 9, this should give you a three digit number. Take the last number of the three (so if you multiply by 9 and get... 682, you would take the 2) and make that the 15th number of IMEI. You can use this website (imei­-number.com­/imei­-validation­-check/) to make sure you did it right.

So, I created a random IMEI number and gave it to the representative who then activated it on my account. It allowed him to finally pick a 4G dataplan and provision my account for it (this is what it looks like on my AT&T online account page: cl.ly­/0x1X1X2c2e3u170j2P36). I thought that he would then have to get the IMEI of my current SIM card to reassociate my account with my phone, but apparently he did not.

Once the 4G plan was on my account I was able to manually add the 4G APNs and successfully connect with speeds that were double to triple what I was receiving before.

I hope this helps anyone that has an AT&T Galaxy Nexus!