Wind Mobile Activate iMessage / Facetime

Oh you are right, I only tested with my contacts who have their email address connected to their imessage/facetime account.

So the jury is still out on the phone number only bit.

has anyone tried using roger's 2G (Wind Away) network? Manually put the phone into 2G (hence using Roger's network) and then get the activation going with the silent SMS's. Since Rogers is a supported carrier it should work. There will be extra SMS charges but the service credits WIND offers during iphone sign ups should cover that.

Tried it, didn't work.

Has anyone tried calling the iMessage and Facetime server's activation number?

The purpose of the SMS is for Apple's server to verify this phone actually owns the phone number. So when iMessage / Facetime is activating, it sends a shortcode text to Apple. But since Wind doesn't support the short code, there has been some users reporting calling the actual number seems to work.

1. Turn on iMessage. When the text says 'Waiting for activation...'

2. Call the activation server number for iMessage: +445773142076

or Facetime: +447786205094

NOTE: This is an international number to UK.

3. Usually after a few minutes it will activate.

Tried this. Doesn't seem to work either 😟

didn't work for me either, said the number didnt exist

I read the troubleshooting for iMessage and Facebook activation on Apple's website and it clearly says in the step 6:

Contact your carrier to verify that there are no restrictions or blocks on text messages. Blocks on text messaging will prevent iMessage and FaceTime registration.

So this means the carrier support is not important, the carrier itself should not block the SMS. So consequenctly this is WIND's fault I guess.

Tried these number, they don't seem to exist. However, I went through my usage history with wind online, and there were a few number these texts were sent to. Tried activating iMessage and calling these numbers and still didn't work. Can anyone check the phone numbers on their usage history online that these texts have been sent to. Mine were

+447537410217

+447537410227

+447537410267

+447537410297

Also I tried going ont he Wind Away (3G) network settings but it doesn't work at all and it shows no service quickly. Will continue trying that to see if it would work.

Hi guys,

Did anyone fix this issue on their iphones on WIND network ?

I just called WIND and they said that on their end everything is setup correctly and that the message which supposed to go out for activation (which will cost 25 cents in any plan) can be sent - and there are no restrictions from their side. They claim that problem is on the Apple side and WIND cannot assist with any 3rd party applications (including iMessage)... but yes, it is setup correctly on their end.. suggested to call apple.

they both point the blame at one another. Apple states that all they require is an SMS from your number to their verification service thing, and that if it doesn't work it's because a carrier is blocking that SMS from being sent. Wind says that they dont block anything and that Apple is messing something up.

I have been troubleshooting this on another carrier that isn't blocking the text messages from going to Apple, the strange thing is that native numbers (numbers on exchanges from the carrier) work fine, but when the numbers are ported from another carrier or landline, the process breaks.

I have contacted Apple ( i am personally effected by this) and pushed to their Tier 3 support. There is a KB article that deal with this issue but its not for public viewing. I asked them if they are working on a fix and they couldn't comment.

The issue appears to be with Apple and porting numbers from another carrier to a carrier that uses this 44 number to activate (non partner carriers).

It doesn't fix the issue but Apple claming its a carrier issue is a cop out. My native number works , my ported number doesn't and I have seen the same +44 numbers on both bills.

I am a Wind Mobile customer in Canada, and I found out what the problem is.

The process Apple uses is as follows:

When you turn iMessage on, the iPhone sends a text message to Apple. It will go to one of several numbers in the UK. When Apple gets the message, they generate a response. This response uses something called Application Port Addressing to direct the message to a specific process running on the phone.

The only way to see these messages is to dump your baseband logs. Apple has instructions for doing this on their developer site under bug reporting.

The initial problem with Wind Mobile was you would never see the reply message from Apple. One could login to myAccount on the Wind site and check their usage and only see the outgoing messages. This recently changed, and at least for me, I started seeing the reply from Apple. Still, no iMessage activation with phone number.

In the iPhone baseband logs, the SMS messages can be read in PDU format. This is basically just a HEX representation of the message with some other data about how it should be delivered and where it came from. There are several online decoders that can interpret the message and give you something readable. Decoding the SMS PDU that came from Apple showed that something was wrong with it. After some minor manipulation of 2 of the fields in the PDU, the problem turned out to be with the encoding bit for the USER DATA of message. It was set to 8 bit and should have been 7 bit. Because of this problem, the length bit for the USER DATA was also wrong, as you can fit more data in the same number of bytes using septets than you can with octets. After changing these two bits, the online decoders displayed the correct message.

Where does this data change? Hard to say. We have to assume that Apple sends it correctly. Therefore it must be getting corrupt somewhere between Apple and the iPhone on Wind's network. There are applications called SMPP gateways that allow messages to be sent across networks. I suspect the problem is with one of these.

Can this be worked around without the help of Wind? The short answer is yes, but it's complicated. You can take the corrupt message from the baseband logs, reformat it as an SMS Submit PDU, and send it to your iPhone's phone number.

This requires that you have another phone with a working SIM that can be used as a GSM modem. Not all phones have this capability. I used an old Nokia 5230. I was able to plug it in to my Mac and used the Shareware app ZTerm to send AT commands to it. I sent the re-formulated response message from Apple to my iPhone number via the old Nokia and now iMessage works with my phone number on Wind. I then did the same for my wife's iPhone and now hers works as well.

After going through this process, who do I point the finger at? I point it squarely at Wind. It is their responsibilty to ensure a message that uses Application Port Addressing is not corrupted on their network.

You can find instructions on how to retrieve your baseband logs from here:

https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/ios/baseband-iphone/

You will likely need to sign up as a developer. You shouldn't have to pay for a developer subscription though (I don't pay to be a developer).

If you can get the logs, you need to look for a section that looks like this:

"GSM SMS Point to Point PDU (as hex str):"