Many UK owners of the Apple Watch Series 3 are reporting that they are unable to activate the LTE functionality on the only British carrier to support it so far, EE.
EE says it is aware of the problems, and in most cases owners will need to call the company to get the problem resolved …
Go to the Apple Watch app on your phone and select “Mobile Data”. If it says “Activating” that means it’s working and all you need to do is wait for it to complete. It can take up to 2 hours, but may complete quicker.
EE says that owners seeing any one of four error messages should not attempt to activate again, but should instead call them.
- Activation failed
- Error code 019
- Error code 007
- This account is not ready to use with Apple Watch
At the time of writing, there were 48 pages of posts to the company’s support forum in the thread complaining about the issue. However, the good news is that they do appear to be being resolved once reported, though the process can be a little painful.
- Contact EE and get them to remove and re-associate a new esim on your account
- Unpair your watch from your iphone
- Turn the watch off and leave it for at least 3 hours
- Turn off WiFi on your iphone
- Pair your Watch to your iPhone and set it up as a new Watch (do not choose restore from backup)
- Select add data plan when prompted
It may also take some time to get a callback from EE, as some customers have been told there are six members of staff working their way through a backlog of hundreds of calls.
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