Connection problems with the iPhone 4 solved (at least for me)!
Not sure if this is mostly a german problem but it seems that a number of people in all german mobile networks (O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone) have problems with network access on their iPhones with 3G (UMTS).
It all started with some news that this problem has hit a good number of people with the new iPhone 4S but as for now it seems more that it’s a problem with iPhones using iOS5 (and especially if you have used your SIM-Card before already).
People are reporting that they have bad 3G data coverage and some say that even making phone calls doesn’t work. Not much from Apple on that topic so far but T-Mobile says it’s the SIM-Card and replaces thoses from a particular series with newer ones.
No word from O2 and Vodafone. Unfortunately I am on O2 (using an iPhone 4) and ran into that problem too. Interestingly all worked fine after I upgraded to iOS5 at first … but looking back it seemed that the quality of reception went down a bit each day until my phone became more or less unresponsive two days ago in regards of data connection.
At first I used the published workaround to delete the SIM-PIN, restart the phone and switch to EDGE. That helped indeed to be connected again but wasn’t a satisfying solution at all (despite the reduced speed I don’t feel comfortable running a phone without SIM-PIN!).
So I went to the next O2 store but wasn’t much surprised that they blamed Apple and said they can’t do anything. Telling them about the SIM-Card change T-Mobile is doing they said that doesn’t help but still gave me a new one to replace my old card.
Back home I opened the envelope and was quite surpised as the card looks very different. The picture above shows my old card on the left and the new one (with a much bigger chip) on the right. So it is definately a different series. Called O2 customerservice and they designated my phone number to the new card. One hour later it was active and I started a first test.
While I only have EDGE inside I went out on the terrace but had to disable and enable 3G as well as data once before the phone switched back to 3G. Opened the Facebook app (which had huge problem to load at all before) … and it displayed the data in a second.
The next morning I used my iPad (tethered with my phone) during the whole one hour train trip into Munich without any problems. That trip goes through areas with quite bad 3G reception and it was fine all time. The last days I was more or less without access while riding the train. But it even seemed to be better reception than before with iOS4. No problems here in the office too (were I also experienced severe connection loss the last days).
So it seems that the SIM card change solved the problem for me. In case you have similar problems I definately would reccomend that you should give it a try. Don’t know if it works for everybody … but there’s not much you have to lose but a lot you could gain!
