Do I have to have an apple ID to simply activate the phone on my iPad?

Question

I added a new iPhone 4 to my AT&T account yesterday for my Father-in-law.  ($49.99 at BestBuy so probably a refurb).  They were supposed to have activated the phone before I left the store.  I bailed out of the store in a hurry and didn't ask them to make a test call.  It has been about 14 hours and the phone is still showing "No Service".  I can connect it to my Wifi with no problems but the phone portion seems to have failed to initialize.
I called AT&T and asked them to check and the young man I spoke with told me he thought that I had to actually set up iTunes on my PC, and set up an apple ID and associate it with the phone to have the telephone part of the iPhone to work. 
This sounds very wrong to me as I have activated iPhones before and they were working by the time I got back to my car, much less 14 hours later without associating my ID with the phones.
I have done a power cycle, a full reset, and a reset network settings reset and none of that has helped.
Is there any reason for me to have to set up an Apple ID to just get the phone to make calls? 
I know that if I want to buy apps, songs, etc. directly from the phone I need to set up and associate an ID with the phone.

Answer 1

I took the phone back to Bestbuy and had them check it out.  The did a reset / restart, called AT&T who said it was fine on their end.  The tech decided to put in a new sim card and that was the problem. 
The phone it self was updated to iOS 5.1.1 so it should have activated OTA and it was the sim card causing the problem.