Expert: DebiN - 4/30/2010

Question
I just recently called about having a cell flashed to metro pcs. I was told that the talk and text would be the only thing that I could do on the phone. At the time, this was ok. I went on and got the samsung rant m540 flashed to Metro pcs. However, I can not use the phone no where except my home town. I took the phone back to metro pcs and told the service rep. she stated that there was nothing she could do about it. She then goes on to say that flashed phones will not pick up everywhere. Had she said this in the beginning, i would have never flashed a phone that i can't go 10 miles out of town to use. is there anything that can be done?

Answer
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me that you can't use a flashed phone outside of the network and the only thing that I can think of is that when you use one of the Metro phones that it knows how to handle an off-network situation so that you can be charged for the calls, etc. and that when you use a flashed phone, there isn't a way to program it just as you can't use the internet. I tell people regularly not to use a phone that was not intended for their carrier, either unlocked for GSM or flashed for CDMA, but people just want to use certain phones and don't want to believe that they won't work properly. I wish that I could tell you that there was something special that they can do to make the phone work outside of your town, but there isn't. If I were you, I might suggest trying to sell the phone to someone who doesn't need to go off of the tiny Metro network, otherwise, I honestly would consider either going with a national carrier like Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T or getting a phone directly from Metro. No carrier guarantees flashed or unlocked phones, so even though the rep should have told you the problem (if she actually knew), she wasn't really required to do so. In otherwords, it's no one's fault, it's just unfortunate that you didn't know and she didn't tell you. I hope this helps. Thanks. Debin