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OnePlus 6T IMEI issues and upcoming 3G shutdown problem! Jan 17, 2022

amynfrank , Jan 17, 2022 :

I own two, OnePlus 6T devices purchased at the same time and I use Cricket Wireless on both devices. Cricket Wireless has over the past few months sent me text messages, as well as interrupted my service on only one of the phones, because they believe that my device is not compatible with their upcoming network; Cricket will be shutting down their 3g network by February 2022.

Cricket offers a couple of ways of checking if your phone will be compatible with their new network:
1) https://www.cricketwireless.com/support/great-big-network/byod-compatibility.html
2) https://www.cricketwireless.com/cell-phones/bring-your-phone

Using the first method, I can clearly see that the OnePlus 6T (A6013) says it is compatible.
Using the second method, when I type in my current OnePlus 6T IMEIs I get conflicting responses.
As I said, I have two 6Ts. One of the devices says it is compatible and hasn't had service interrupted. The device that has had service interrupted indeed shows an incompatible IMEI using their checker.

Interestingly enough, I had the device that shows as incompatible serviced by OnePlus on two occasions for the same issue. The second time they replaced the phone with another OnePlus 6T; the IMEI of this replacement phone is the one that says it is not compatible with Cricket. When I check the compatibility of the originally purchased phone, Cricket says that IT is compatible with the upcoming network.

Searching in the internet and reddit show that many people are having similar issues with various carriers. However, since I have two supposedly identical phones and am getting conflicting results, I thought I would share that here.

Numerous phone calls to customer service at both Cricket and OnePlus have yielded nothing. Cricket tells me to buy a new phone, OnePlus tells me to call Cricket. I just had a Chat session with OnePlus and was told to post here to get the developers attention (wasn't that the point of the Chat session?...but I digress

OnePlus -- here is a Reference ID: 211206-002287 of my initial request from December 2021. Please feel free to contact me to discuss further.

Francisco