[T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S 4] dauntless89:
Howdy,

About 3 weeks ago, I bought two refurbished SGH-M919 phones off eBay to replace mine and my wife's broken/old phones. Her phone was worse off, so the first one I set up was to be hers. Rooted, installed TWRP, and flashed Mokee with no issues. Put her SIM in, put her data back on, she's good to go.

I go to set the next one up for myself, do everything the exact same way, and came to realize after I put my SIM in that the phone is not connecting to LTE. Call/SMS/Wifi all work fine. I didn't notice whether or not it was doing this before rooting, recovery, and ROM.

It's giving me a "Sign-in to network" notification. I tap it, it takes me to a T-Mobile ConnectMe screen. It gives me a "Get Started" button, which I tap, and it says "We're sorry, you have switched your SIM card between different devices, so you will need to manage your account through My T-Mobile or the MyAccount app. Once you have replaced the original SIM card, you may resume managing your account through on-device account maintenance." I can only tap close. My wife's phone didn't give me this "error". I made sure the APN settings were identical between the phones, they were.

I called T-Mobile, they gave me a bit of runaround, said everything looked fine from their end, and "rebooted the connection" which didn't improve anything. They also had me verify my APN settings with them. They had me enter some different values, but it didn't change anything. They also advised me against purchasing phones from less than reputable sources. Great, thanks, that was helpful.

I switched the SIM cards between the two phones and this one is still not connecting to LTE, the other phone is. This led me to think maybe it was a hardware issue, and looked into the modem as a possibility. I found that T-Mobile updated the baseband last month on the stock 4.4.4 ROM, so I flashed that baseband and no change. Both phones were on NH7 when I received them.

I happened to notice on my T-Mobile account page that the device status is listed as "locked/unknown." So, I called T-Mobile twice today for an unlock code. The first guy was less than helpful but the second person did enter an unlock request for me, theoretically, I am currently waiting for that email to show up sometime in the next 24 hrs. But, the phone so far has not given me an unlock prompt so I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with that unlock code once I get it. I'm also not 100% clear on whether the code is for a SIM unlock (which I shouldn't need) or what exactly. It is just the next in a series of ideas which I'm rapidly running out of. A check of the IMEI number revealed it was clean on all US carriers, with the exception of T-Mobile and Sprint which both come up as "unknown." Don't know if that means anything or not.

I'm getting ready to jam this eBay store up, but I'd really rather the phone just start working. I've been dinking with this for weeks and my frustration is mounting, especially since I can't seem to find anyone else who has had/posted about this problem before. I'm not a cell phone hobbyist or anything, and I'm just going off what I can find on Google and places like this. Any ideas/help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Tony