I have a
prepaid SIM from
Ekit PTY LTD d.b.a.
Telestial.com. I have come across a couple of issues using the phone so far in my attempts to
familiarize and verify it works prior to leaving the country.
There is a fairly basic, but sufficient
Web-based configuration utility to control the service, which seems effective and changes are instantaneous for all intents. However, the call divert menu is at best confusing. There are two exclusive (radio) options, one allows you to specify individual options (mapping to
forward if busy,
forward if not answered, and
forward if out of reach), and the second option is labeled simply
all. As I wanted to set all
conditional forwarding options to be the same, I selected the latter radio option. Unfortunately,
*all meant
unconditionally forward rather than
all conditional forwards, which meant I never received an incoming call. Experimentation (but not
Telestial customer support who simply suggested disabling the 3G connection on my phone), was able to determine this was the problem.
Now I would feel that this might have been an obvious thing to check, especially if the call were being instead diverted to a number I had chosen. However, what I had chosen to
divert all calls to was, in fact,
no divert. It would seem reasonable that choosing the
no divert option for all calls would try and send all calls to my phone. Instead, it meant that all calls went to an
IVR sytem. Disabling
voicemail, and disabling all redirects via GSM codes did nothing to address this. Likewise when I changed from "no divert" for "all calls" to simply "no divert" on each of the conditional forwardings, rather than receiving a call-failed situation or endless ringing the call was again diverted to the IVR which meant that in a situation where multiple phones were ringing, the IVR would always answer preventing me from ever getting a call. The bandage solution, as I've failed so far to explain the problem to the customer support, is to set conditional forwards to a number which will wait for a period of time, basically blocking the IVR. This is obviously
sub-optimal.