Quote:
Originally Posted by HappyCamp
I ended up going to a Turkcell shop. They are almost everywhere in Istanbul. I sometimes see 2-3 Turkcell stops while standing in one spot.
My experience was not great. I went to what appeared to be a company store as it was quite large. They spoke very little English but were able to sell me a SIM card for 44 TL ($22). Luckily there was a customer who spoke English who helped translate. They said to wait one hour and my SIM would become activated. Once it was activated I could then come back and add on 1GB of data for 25 TL ($12.50). I was supposed to dial 8090 once the SIM became activated.
Unfortunately I went two days without the SIM becoming activated. But finally on the third day I turned on my phone and I was on the network. I then dialed 8090, set it to English. Then went into a Turkcell shop and added my 1GB of data.
Not sure if I maybe should have tried power cycling my phone more often. Maybe it would have become active sooner. I had mainly just left it powered on.
During the two days when it didn't work I had no success on figuring out what was wrong. One person told me my phone # was disconnected. Another said that I had to pay the tax on the phone before it would work. But then it worked on my 3rd day when I turned it on.
I'll see if my phone gets cut-off before I leave on day seven.
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I was able to use my Turkcell SIM card the entire time. Though I did get an SMS message that made me think that they would blacklist my phone's IMEI at some point in the future. I was only there for a week and once it started working it kept working.