Unable to get Family link and LTE to work on Galaxy watch 7 paired S25+ on Verizon

[whiterabbit4178]

Can someone help me??

I have Verizon service. 

They sold me both an S25+ and a Galaxy Watch 7, knowing they were for a 12 year old and that we wanted to set them up with parental controls and numbershare. 

Apparently, after over 20 hours of Tech Coach, no one in Verizon can get the devices provisioned properly and setup. Samsung support hasn't been much more helpful either. Everyone just reads from scripts and makes your perform the same steps endlessly. 

[realaud]

You might have to combine parental controls with Life360 for tracking. Is number share a way for the parents to know who's calling the child and answer the call as well?  I have heard the term but am not sure what it does. As far as I understood, number share was just a way of linking the watch's LTE number to the phone's number. Different carriers call it different things.

[whiterabbit4178]

They can't even get the service active on the watch...

[FredSkooly]

As a last result, you can try switching carriers. I've had AT&T in the past, then Verizon. AT&T made syncing phone numbers really difficult. Verizon was a little bit better. I switched to Google Fi in 2023 and everything was super easy. My bill went down $60 a month (for 2 lines) and they don't make you pay extra money for data on a smartwatch. Also, if you ever go on vacation out the country your data still works at no extra cost. Additionally, they'll give you sim cards for free so your tablets or old phones can have data as well at no extra charge.

[whiterabbit4178]

Thanks! I will look into that!

[realaud]

Insist on it. It's not your fault they can't make the LTE work it's either theirs's or the watch is defective.  They certainly should not be charging you for an add-on plan if it's useless.

[realaud]

They should give you a new watch. It's obviously defective.

[Desi08]

So this may or may not help, but you can add a child to your Samsung "household" you'd be labeled as "family organizer" . I don't know how detailed the parental controls are. But I added myself a 26 year old, to her mother's Samsung Smart things household and not only can I control our TV, I believe she could access parental controls if I were a child lol .... And I may be able to access her location ....... Anyways, I hope you find this as interesting as I did. I discovered it 2 days ago. Lol

[whiterabbit4178]

Hey! I'm the family organizer and he's the kid..but, I don't think there's a way to toggle back and forth between the two users on the s25+ - I think if Im logged in as me and set up the watch on the wearable app and then log into his account, it boots you out of the wearable app.

[whiterabbit4178]

Several weeks later...I am still in the same boat. Verizon still cannot get the LTE service to work on the watch. They cannot set the watch up with parental controls/Family Link for a child if the phone is set up for a child. 

If anyone out there has had this issue and knows the resolution...I am all ears. I don't understand how there isn't a way for the parent to log in with their account, pick the child's account, set up the devices, and be done. 

Right now, they have the phone set up with my son's email address that is supervised and linked to the Family Link account. They had me set the watch up "for myself," not "for a child" because the watch will not allow a child's phone to set up a child's watch.

Verizon shows the watch as being activated, but there is no LTE service on the watch. It is only working in Bluetooth mode. Even if they can get the watch to activate with LTE, I still can't see it in the Family Link app since it isn't set up for a child. 

[Members_EOKQGVT]

I setup both my kids up with stand alone LTE Galaxy 5 watches 3 years ago on T-Mobile. I used my old legacy note 8 phone via wifi to configure the watches. They don't have access to the note 8 but I do use it to download updates. At the time I didn't use family link since they didn't have phones. It has worked without any issues and was linked to there own Gmail accounts. Last year I had to incorporate family link and other parental controls into their lives. The younger one still has the same setup. The LTE Galaxy 5 watch with his own number.  It still works perfectly. 

I found this video for initial setup; I hope it helps:

https://www.att.com/device-support/article/wireless/000108791/Samsung/SamsungSML305USML315U