IPhone :: IMessage Is Waiting For Activation. Please Help!

Please help me!

I keep getting "waiting for activation" on my iMessage. I can only send/receive iMessage from my email address, NOT my phone number.


And I'm not sure if this is connected or not, but under setting > phone > show my caller ID, the ON button is greyed out.

A little history & weird problems I encountered:

My iPhone 4S was stolen about a month ago (I'm still ****** about it).I did a remote wipe on it and I figured the person who stole is has thrown away the SIM card because the number isn't active anymore.

So I just bought a brand new iPhone 4S and a new number again. I synced it to iTunes and upgraded it to iOS 5.1 then I did a restore from my old back up. Everything was fine except for the iMessage. It shows "waiting for actvation". When I tap under Receive At, the email address is listed as well as my OLD phone number (the one that was stolen). It was greyed out and the status was "verying" which later turned to "error". I have no way of editing or removing that old number. When I connect my iPhone to iTunes, the phone # was shown as n/a on iTunes, but after 30 mins or so, it will appear.

So I did a restore again and this time set is as a new iPhone. The old phone number is now gone, but only my email address is listed. I can't input my phone number there.

I have done all kind of fixing suggestions that I can find online, but nothing works so far.

- Date & time set as automatic (I don't know why this matter, but mine was already set as automatic from the begining)

- Reset network setting

- Changing the DNS to 8.8.8.8.

- Restore to factory setting (from back up & as new iPhone)

- Turning on/off iMessage & facetime

- Sign out/in of apple ID

- Change location from apple ID

- Hard reset/reboot

And many others.

Is this an error on my iPhone or maybe the iOS or is it the carrier?

Any input is greatly appreciated!

Info:
iPhone 4S, iOS 5.1