Hello together,
another fun episode of “phone (3) bugs - special weird edition”…
Short story: When travelling to different countries, sometimes i lose signal completly until i move to a different country. Even for weeks.
Long story:
Few weeks ago I did a train trip around Europe. Started in Germany (where I’m from), via France to Switzerland to Austria. Once i entered Austria my Phone 3 started to behave weird. Sometimes I had signal outages, sometimes mobile data wouldn’t work, even though it showed 5G. As the day went on the outages became longer until i was limited to some 5-15seconds of signal every few hours. I changed/reset every possible setting, restarted the phone, tried a sim card from a different provider, swapped to esim. Nothing helped. Called my provider: They assume it’s a phone problem. Next day, even though i have 5 bars of signal and 5G (or LTE, HSDPA, Edge) nothing worked…
I travelled further to Italy and as soon as I crossed the boundary everything was working again. Went to France once again, flew to Munich, everything worked for several days. I flew to Frankfurt and boom: The occasional outages were back until after a few reboots etc. everything stopped working again.
The phone couldn’t connect automatically to a network. With manual network search i was able to get some signal bars and 5G again but still was unable to make calls or use mobile data… Even a factory reset didn’t help.
At this point i contacted nothing support which were very friendly and kinda helpful. We gathered some bugreports/logs and tried to reproduce the error and they suggested i should do a warranty claim with my reseller. Conversation and time went on and after two weeks of no signal in germany i travelled to Bulgaria. And tadaa: Phone 3 was working again like a charm. Even after i travelled back to Germany everything was working again.
I continued with the warranty claim anyway (because i fear the error will happen again when I’m travelling) and my phone is currently at the repair shop of my reseller (big german provider). I provided them with the whole conversation between me and the support crew, the bugreports and a detailed description of the error. Hopefully they mind and find something or at least provide me with a new phone. Let’s see how that goes…
I still can’t fully wrap my head around this issue. At first I thought it must be an issue with my provider and roaming in austria (but for context: I used my phone two times before in austria without problems, aswell as in egypt).
Then i thought maybe it is a very unfortunate hardware defect which occured spontaneously exactly at country-borders haha.
Now I think it must be a software issue somehow with the phone having trouble connecting to a network. What i find very weird is, that as soon as it connects to a different network from a different country it somehow “resets” and then works in the country in which it didn’t work before… So weird….
Ok, i just wanted to share this. Maybe somebody experienced the same error?
Sadly that issue doesn’t improve my opinion on the phone (3) .This is now the third big and weirdest bug i encountered during the last year… Never had so many issues with any phone before.
I keep you updated on the conclusions of the repair shop from my reseller…
Hope you had fun reading :/
