I figured more than a couple of people would be interested in doing this, so I thought I'd share what worked for me. Last night, I managed to get the phone fully programmed, with internet on my Alltel U number. If it worked for me, it may work for you. This walkthrough is for the HTC Droid Eris, although I assume it will work on the Motorola Droid as well.

GETTING PHONE DIALING TO WORK:

First of all, I had to load an Alltel PRL on the phone. 3033 from Corolada worked for me. When the phone first starts up, it asks to be activated. I somehow managed to get past that screen by plugging the phone into a usb port and rebooting. After that, I could mount it normally, and dragged the PRL onto the minisd card. If that doesn't work, you can probably pull the card out and load it with a minisd card reader. Dumb mistake I made: make sure to unmount the card before trying to find the PRL. Otherwise, the filesystem can't find the card.


To update the prl, dial ##775 (PRL). Password is 000000.

Select Update PRL, choose your prl, select OK, hit the menu button and select commit modifications. Let the phone reboot. Once it rebooted, I couldn't dial *228 without receiving an error message, so I still had to manually update the NAM settings. YMMV.

To program the phone manually, dial ##7764726 (##PROGRAM). Password is still 000000.

Select NAM Settings. Change the Mobile Directory Number to your phone number. Now comes the tricky part. You need to fill in the rest of these numbers to the best of your ability. I'm not sure most of the fields mean, or which fields are required for *228 to work. For maximum success, I suggest you go into the programming menu on your old phone and copy those settings. Other people on this forum may be more helpful in that regard.

Googling gave me these numbers:

MCC: 311.
Home SID/NID #1: 418/65535 (I'm Pretty sure the SID depends on your area code)
Primary CDMA Channel, A band: 283
Secondary CDMA Channel, A band: 691
Primary CDMA Channel, B band: 384
Secondary CDMA Channel, B band: 777


Once you are finished editing everything, press MENU and select commit changes. If everything is set correctly, you should hear the Alltel welcome message when you dial *228. I suggest doing an OTA programming just in case you missed a setting. I also did the OTA PRL update. The phone should now reboot.

GETTING DATA TO WORK:

I got these settings off of my PPC6800's EPST. The menus are almost exactly the same.

Dial ##778 (##PST). Password is still 000000.

Go to Security.
HDR AN AUTH user Id (LONG): yourphonenumber@alltel.net
HDR AN AUTH Password (LONG): You will have to copy this setting from your old phone This password different from the PPP password (i.e., not alltel).
PPP USER ID: yourphonenumber@alltel.net
PPP PASSWORD: alltel
S.IP DUN User name: leave this field blank


Go to M.IP Settings.
Number of Profiles: 1
Active User Profile Index: 1
Mobile Node-HA Authentication: Disable
Send a Registration Request Only in Use: Disable
Dormant Handoff Optimization: Enable
Leave everything else as it is.

(I don't know if these last settings are necessary. I got data to work without changing anything here. But, these settings were in my phone, so I added them.)

Go to M.IP Default Profile.
Enable Profile: Enable
NAI: yourphonenumber@alltel.net
DUN NAI: leave blank

I think these values are unique for each phone number. You'll have to get them off your old smartphone.
MN HA SPI Value(Hex)
MN HA SPI Value(Hex)

Primary HA Address: 68.28.15.12
Secondary HA Address: 68.28.31.12
DMU Public Key(PKOID): 0
MN Authenticator(HEX): 0


Right now, I can't verify that the EVDO is working. 3G coverage at my house is spotty at best. It will sporadically display connecting with a 3G icon, but the speeds feel like 1X.

This is my first ever walkthrough and first real post. I figured I lurked long enough and should give something useful back to the community. I probably missed something I wrote this all in one setting from memory. These were the steps I took to the best of my recollection. It went a lot smoother and faster than I had originally assumed. Verizon has gotten infinitely better at not meddling with their phones. The only indicator that it's a Verizon branded phone (besides the logo and startup screen) is the visual voicemail. It can't be deleted, but at least you can remove it from the home screen. Otherwise, the thing is pure Android with no restrictions.

I have to say that I went in to the store expecting to buy the Motorola Droid, but after playing with it, I just fell in love with the Eris. It is already shaping up to be an awesome phone, and I can't wait until the 2.0 upgrade.

The steps I took could probably be streamlined. If you are really daring, you could do everything at once in EPST. Feel free to ask me any questions.

I have a couple of questions.
Did you buy the Eris outright, no contract?
Before you started the procedure above, did you use the VZW phone switch tool to change ESN's?
How does the data work on prepaid?
Are you officially VZW prepaid now?

Yes, I bought the phone full price. My plan hasn't transitioned yet, so I used the Alltel ESN tool. I have a feeling it wouldn't work had I waited for the transition. Data is 10 cents/minute.

Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.80 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.2.14912/812; U; en) Presto/2.2.0)

I have a feeling some of the codes like ##775 and what not are unique to HTC phones and the moto will be different....

Quick update:

I think I did something to screw up the data settings because the download speeds I was getting were incredibly slow. So, I did a hard reset on the phone, programmed it with *228, and updated the PRL. The only settings that need to be changed to get data working are in the Security under ##778. Just change PPP User ID to yournumber@alltel.net and PPP Password to alltel. Commit the changes and reboot the phone. Now, I am getting 3G speeds.

This would have been a hot thread I bet if the Merger never happened & Alltel was still competing with Verizon. But since most of us are verizon now, it would be easier to just get the droid & switch plans just like I'm about to do.

This is very misleading: the title is about Droid but the talk is about Eris, which are totally different - one is Motorola and the other is HTC.

So far nobody knows the ##code to enter an EPST-alike menu to program data settings on Droid.

Ummm dunno what it take to be called Droid but thats what its listed as on verizon as well as in big letters right across the box. I was under assumption the Droid name is licensed from Lucas Films and does not indicate one particular phone

##PROGRAM, send, 000000, Verify
Two Alltel users in this neck of the woods (Iowa sid1236 and sid286) are using a Motorola Droid with Smartpak (legacy) plans. No problems, so far!

I did not do an over the air activation, nor did I change any authentication settings. Didn't even look for it.

Wirelessly posted (MOT-QA30/00.72 UP.Browser/7.2.7.5.546 (GUI) MMP/2.0)



yeah, the name droid is like a car brand, example: honda they have all makes and models but it's still a honda. So I guess it would be wise to include what model droid when posting unless the action is across the board for all models.

Yeah, after I posted it, I realized the title was misleading, but I have no idea how to change the title without reposting. Also, I assumed that with it being an Android phone, the menus would be very similar. crain, can you or anyone else verify the similarity of programming menus?

Re: this thread not being as useful now that the merger has occurred, some people are still divested who may be willing to pay full msrp and would like to have data active. Or, some brave person who wants to activate on Cricket/Page Plus/etc... but doesn't know the programming codes. Hopefully this info will help them out.

And since I'm tacking stuff on anyway:
On the Droid Eris, ##33284 gets you a field test menu, ##7738 lets you change the P_REV, and ##3424 will put you in diagnostics mode. I tried hooking my phone up to QPST this weekend to see if I could get it to connect in diagnostics mode. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a driver for it, even after installing HTC Sync in the slim hope that it would perform whatever magic voodoo necessary to get it to work. At least the phone has its own built-in EPST.

I think this thread is very useful, my comment was refering to how many pages (maybe 40 by now) this thread would have been by now if the merger did not occur. I remember the good old days when we all wanted the lastest verizon smartphone working on the Alltel network.

As was mentioned earlier, Droid is the series of Android phones for VZW. Some genius decided to change the name of the Motorola Sholes to Droid. So actually it's the Droid Droid. Brilliant.

Verizon's Droid is a series, not just a phone; Droid Eris coming from HTC

This is a nice thread for me as I'm in the AT&T buyout area... I'm getting jack for new phones as of now... and still waiting to see what exactly happens...

NOTE-

To get EVDO working you need the following settings in security specified:
HDR AN AUTH user Id (LONG): yourphonenumber@alltel.net
HDR AN AUTH Password (LONG): your ESN on of the phone (with capitalized lettering).

You can convert your MEID to an ESN here:

http://www.l4digital.com/Tools/Conversion.aspx