SGS Bell i9000m on Telus issues - General Questions and Answers

Hey everyone,
This is my last gasp and possibly resolving my issue. I have a Bell GT-I9000m phone. It is unlocked, rooted with CM7 2.3.4 JVK. I usually use this phone on the Rogers network but recently moved to a rural area.
Rogers' coverage in rural areas in my province is horrid. I decided to take advantage of Telus' 6gb data plan offer, thinking I could put my new SIM in the phone and everything would be great.
At the Telus kiosk in a near town I got my plan and made a couple calls on the phone to ensure it was working. When I got into my car I initiated the Telus APN and boom HSPA was enabled and everything was great. About 15 minutes later I noticed my signal bars diminish to zero and the phone fell back to emergency calls only and I could not get signal back by rebooting or anything. When searching networks ROGERS was the only one that was seen as available.
This morning I called TELUS and they said it was a SIM card issue. So I went to another kiosk in another town that is a bit closer to me and they gave me a SIM. Again, everything started out great, I received a text and browsed internet at full speed then on the drive home the bars diminished to none and I was stuck with the exact problem as mentioned above.
I spent an hour with a TELUS technical rep. She was great helping me even though it was a phone off of their network. We could not come to any sort of resolve for my issue. I have tried using *#*#4636#*#* to change to WCDMA only and multiple other options.
Further issues for me is my phone will only connect to my computer to charge. I think some pins are broken or something because I cannot connect via USB to flash anything. I can send files to the phone wirelessly and enter download mode (although the phone is not recognized by the computer) and CWM recovery mode.
The phone also works perfectly with my still active ROGERS sim.
Thanks for any ideas on this.
All the best
Steve

Related

every other boot in exact same spot, PRL changes

So I have been for the past week, at my house, having about the worst 4G reception ever. It shows 4G in the status bar, until I actually try and connect to any internet service, and then it disappears. Well this started on my second Thunderbolt, so I assumed something was up with the phone, specially since I unrooted the phone, and the issue was still there. So I went and exchanged my phone today. I noticed that the issue remained. Brand new phone, at my place of work today was pulling 20+ down from speedtest and then I go home, and even outside my house, it is loosing 4G everytime you try to do anything on the internet.
I noticed only one difference. My PRL changed from 15008 to 15011.
So figuring my new phone is probably fine from a HW standpoint, I went ahead and rooted this phone, and I noticed something weird. Everytime I boot the phone, it switched between two PRLs. It either has a PRL of 1, and then reboot and it then will have a PRL of 15011. Rinse and repeat.
I also noticed that in the same location that it used to be signal strength was around -82Db, and is now closer to -95Db.
So I am going to call Verizon tomorrow, and see if they know if a tower is down, etc, or see if they can check into it, as my phone is only usable at home on 3G, which is the same reason I paid my ETF on sprint and left for verizon, because I could get LTE in my house.
I even tried Das BAMF 1.5 and then flashed the radio update, and there was zero change in anyway.
I am going to assume there is a screwy tower nearby that is causing my problem, but if anyone has any suggestions let me know!
my phone acts the same way around my apartment...
i think they must be messing with the towers still. specially cause we haven't officially got 4g here yet.
have the same problem up in Northwest Columbus - 4G has been going in and out for the last two days for me - figured it was just the tower, 3G is absolutely fine.

[Q] CM7 (Build 93) - 3G Radio Issues

{Reposting to the right forum}
Ok. So I ran into a serious issue and it most likely has something to do with the 3G radio.
Here's what happened. Phone was down to about 15% batteries after some Youtube and Angry birds. I was at my folks place and the cell signal there is not as strong, but still a bar showing. I noticed the phone was quite warm, but thought nothing of it since I was using Youtube/Angry birds. Check a few emails and noticed the batters quickly dropping to 12% within a few minutes and noticed Battery Status Monitor was reporting 990mA draw. I was alarmed, but didn't think too much about it and went to have dinner with the folks.
about 30/40 min later after dinner. The battery was dead. Didn't have my charger with me, so I didn't plug in for another couple of hours until I got home. Plugged in, booted up, everything was fine, except it would not connect to cell service stating "No Service". I then tried a bunch of things, rebooting, swapping out the battery, swapping out the SIM, but no avail. Swapping the same SIM to my old HTC works fine and connects on AWS 3G network.
This morning I tried another SIM that not on AWS, and it connects (assuming on 2G/EDGE network). Swap back in my original SIM and back to "No Service" (my provider only has 3G AWS service).
So at this point, I'm pretty convinced I have a hardware problem so I restore the stock Froyo ROM to return my phone...then magically, I'm back alive on the 3G AWS network!
Someone tell me what's going on!
I haven't tried to reflash CM7 again. Quite frankly I'm quite scared this may not be hardware problem and maybe a software issue instead, and may be stressing the 3G radio.
Help!

[Q] Weird Signal Issues

Ok ladies and gents. I swear I used search, and even searched a few other device threads.
Remember the big-todo over the iPhone 4 and how holding it wrong lead to a loss of service? I've got what seems to be the same thing, sort of, with my phone. Lemme explain the whole situation.
I had an iPhone 4, and it got pretty great service. I got at least three bars in my house. My brother made the switch to the skyrocket and initially loved it. all that changed when the signal issues attacked.
From near day-one, he couldn't get it to work. He had to have gone through 20 ROMs over three months. In a last ditch effort, he bought a used S3 and passed the skyrocket to me. I thought I could fix it. Here I am, 4 months later and it's gotten worse if anything.
I've tried 4 different ROMs (including stocks, superlites, CM10.1, and PAC) and have come to settle on CM10.1. I initially had UCLi3, and thought that was the signal problem, seeing as when I went to UCLL3 it got slightly better, and then UCLK4 was working better than my iPhone did for about three days. It tanked overnight and out of frustration I switched to the UXUMA7 and it worked even BETTER for about a week before it went south as well.
My APNs are correct, I know that much. I switch to AT&T Phone, and I will get a little phone service if I hold my phone up and squint just right when standing next to a signal tower. AT&T LTE will give me great service in a heavy service area by a tower, but zero phone service. I was able to make one phone call yesterday, but had to use bluetooth, as the running theme here as well is that it always loses service the minute my hand/body is within a foot of the phone.
Any ideas before I throw caution into the wind and shell out for a new phone? I'm about to live abroad in about three weeks, so I may have to anyway, but I'd rather not pass a lemon to someone else.
Im guessing its the LTE problem that 4.2.2 roms have they changed how it calculates how many bars shows with signal dbm. Its the same signal just shows up as less so just use whatever radio you have had the most success with leave apn at AT&T LTE. You could try going to settings, mobile networks, network operators then choose choose automatically it might give you a more steady connection but its not really required.
If you still have problems you could take out your sim card and use *#2263# and change band to WCDMA all insted of automatic and that should solve your problems.
I typed it in like you have it there to no avail, and tried it again using an astrisk at the end as well. Nothing. Is that the right code? Seems to me I've read somewhere that CM disabled using that...
*Edit: Found the code for "phone info" which worked, and within that was a radio preference setting. But no WCDMA All, so I put it on WCDMA Preferred. My next question is that if ATT is GSM, why will this help even if I can get to the RF selector?
*Edit 2: Confirmed. ROMs not running touchwiz will not run most of the codes. I'm flashing the stock 4.1.2 to see if I can get that code (and subsequently the right RF option) to work until I can figure out how to switch RF options on CM 10.1.
*Final Edit: Found the option, changed it, realized what was going on. I'm on AT&T, meaning GSM and LTE. When I changed it to CDMA All, it switched me over to a strictly HSPA network, which ignored any other available ones. I got to playing with the settings and found that not only are they not the answer to my problem, but they had the potential to make it worse. I really feel that the issue at hand may be hardware. I blew out the RF chip on my first smartphone years ago (a state-of-the-art Palm Treo 700w) and it acted this same way. I'm wondering if the owner before us wasn't screwing with it and messed it up. A little tin foil can answer that question.

SIM card swapping

Luckily this is a curiousity question as the urgency worked itself out.
I have my Doubleshot connected to the Rogers network here in Canada, and I've tried other SIM cards before (i.e. T-Mobile) without issue. But this one had the representatives (and tier two support) stumped.
I walked into an Eastlink store (competing communications company although their roaming is done through Rogers frequencies) with a promotional flyer. We got talking about switching, and they offered to do a test to see if the phone is compatible. So I thought, hey, why not? So they popped an Eastlink SIM in my phone, turned it back on, picked up the network no problem. Well and good.
The problem occurs when she put my Rogers SIM back in. Boot the phone up and the network wasn't recognizing. No service. We went to Settings > Mobile Networks > Network Operators. The searching took forever then threw up and error. No networks to choose from.
The interesting part is that the Rogers APN's were present. I thought maybe the SIM card went bad. Luckily the Rogers store was across the street so we popped that into a feature phone, no issues. I then thought there was some weird (new) setting preventing it from connecting. So I booted into recovery and restored a backup from three days ago. No luck.
The problem ended up fixing itself, about an hour later, while waiting for the bus (after having given up). I made a few test calls to be sure. Since it's working now, it's merely a curiousity, but the issue stands: what would have caused this and is there any way to restore service faster? Using Tbaldens CM 10.1 if that helps.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Still very interesting. I find now that every time I reboot the phone, it takes a few minutes for service to be established. Long enough for Auto Pilot Mode (one of the apps I use in case I'm in the depths of big buildings) to be engaged. I may have to quarantine that app for a little while. Or just not reboot the phone.
My Rogers SIM is an older card. It would have been pressed in 2007 or 2008 (which is also why the fastest internet I can get on it is EDGE). It may be time I shell out the $10 for a replacement. For whatever reason, that just may fix this newly attained lag on connecting.
joel.maxuel said:
Still very interesting. I find now that every time I reboot the phone, it takes a few minutes for service to be established. Long enough for Auto Pilot Mode (one of the apps I use in case I'm in the depths of big buildings) to be engaged. I may have to quarantine that app for a little while. Or just not reboot the phone.
My Rogers SIM is an older card. It would have been pressed in 2007 or 2008 (which is also why the fastest internet I can get on it is EDGE). It may be time I shell out the $10 for a replacement. For whatever reason, that just may fix this newly attained lag on connecting.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just activated a new Rogers (LTE) SIM card. Booted up the phone, and service was recognized by the time I entered my login PIN. So everything looks good (as it looks like my old SIM was starting to die). I'm still stuck with EDGE, but that is due to the phone being a non-Rogers phone. No big deal there.

Wildly intermittent data connection

Starting about two weeks ago my phone started dropping 4G signal down to 3g with no apparent reason. This is in the same locations that I've been in multiple times in the past and had excellent connectivity. To make it more interesting, my wife has the exact same phone purchased on the exact same date. standing next to her she will be on 4g and I will be on 3G. This is on the Verizon service. So far I have been to Verizon and replace the SIM card. Reset data connection. And done a factory reset. If I cycle the airplane mode four five times in a row many times but not always it will restore 4G service. Any guesses at all?
Open 'About Phone' under settings on both phones and compare various versions. One may have received a new update before the other.
Ever since the March retail update my signal indicator seems to constantly bounce from Edge to H, H+ and LTE(xt1955-5 on TMO). When I am in an area with good reception(I live deep in the sticks), the download rate(1-4 MB/s) does not waiver despite the signal indicator changing every 10 seconds. When reception is known to be sketchy, and it indicates I have LTE, I am still lucky to get 100 KB/s max down.
Is your phone rooted? If so, what ROM are you using?
Some ROMs (and perhaps stock firmware) have an option to choose the preferred network type for your phone to connect to. Perhaps the setting was changed to 3G on your phone.
Replaced
Never did get to find out what the problem was. I was able to get a warranty replacement. Thanks for all the suggestions. I did look into most of them. I think it helped me get the warranty service expedited by saying that I tried all these various things. My wife's phone in mine are on different software versions. However my replacement phone, which I'm presently using, had the same software version that I had problems with before and it's working flawlessly. So it ended well but I still have no idea what happened. Thanks again for all the help and suggestions.

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