Iphone 4s signal issues

[mirzank]

I'm having some serious signal issues on my iphone,mto the point where its jsut getting intolerable.

Im in toronto with fido, and what ends up happening is that ill have full bars on the screen, and suddenly ill either see no service, and then it will search for half a minute or so, and then signal will come back, or it will jsut say no signal and then stays that way until i notice andndo airplane mode on off. If im in an elevator it especially has issues with reaquiring signal once im out.

The other variant of this issue is that suddenly my phone goes from full bars to 4 flat lines. So it doesnt say no signal, but i know the 4 flat bars basically mean theres no signal.

Even when my phone has full signal, i question what the signal strength really is. I basically miss 80% of my calls, ATLEAST. And thats not an exaggeration. On some busy days i wont hear a single ring for any calls, and ill just get that text messaging notifying me of a missed called.

I used to have this issue with a 3gs back in the day. Then it went away, eitehr randomly, or after my 4th 3gs exachange for otehr issues. Surprisingly with iphone 4 i had signal issues, but didnt have this random going from full bars to no bars issue.

Then i got the 4s and its the worst. I went in, got it exchanged, and still happening, so leads me to think its jsut a general iphone issue. But i find it hard to believe the iphone can be this bad for eferyone at receiving calls.

What ive tried is restores, and my iphone is not jailbroken. It used to be back in the day with my 3gs, never jb with the 4 onwards. I even thought maybe there are lingering jb elemetns in my backup, so i tried an icloud backup and restore, but no luck.

Can someone explain if this is my cellphone provider issue or a general iphone issue. Ive done all these exchanges but still ahfe problems, so maybe its iphones in general? Ive tried with both the use data connection to search for best signal feature in location services, and not sure what is better. Currently ive turned it off, to ensure minimal intrference from gps if in fact it is that.

 

[iSayuSay]

Since it's been that way from 3gs up to 4s .. Have u tried to test carrier's coverage signal on your area? Use another phone and see if it has signal problem too.

I have this problem with my carrier, but very very rarely happens and it never cause me to miss my phone calls. So I know it's not entirely my iPhone's problem. It's my carrier's, or my home location.

 

[mirzank]

Since it's been that way from 3gs up to 4s .. Have u tried to test carrier's coverage signal on your area? Use another phone and see if it has signal problem too.

I have this problem with my carrier, but very very rarely happens and it never cause me to miss my phone calls. So I know it's not entirely my iPhone's problem. It's my carrier's, or my home location.

I also think its something to do with the carrier, but i just cant figure out how its possible to go from full bars to none in asplit second. With the i4 i remember a lot of times i would have only 2 or 3 bars, so at least id know the signal was weak. Withthe 4s im always at full.

This doesnt just happen at home. It will happen walking around outside as well. My hunch is it has something to do with how the iphone switches from cell tower to cell tower. It just seems confused, or doesnt know how to switch over smoothly.

 

[cynics]

Yeah man, sounds like your carrier. If all iPhones were like that their would tons of reports about.

 

[stevemiller]

@mirzank,

incredibly, your post so precisely describes my situation i had to double check that it wasn't my post!

i'm in toronto, on fido, have a 4S, and all the same issues:

-dropped calls galore (at least 50% of all calls)

-i can be standing still looking at my phone and service will suddenly disappear for 5 seconds or so and then re-appear

-whenever i legitimately go out outside service areas (like in the subway) the phone will sometimes be unable to acquire a signal when i get out. however if i toggle airplane mode on/off the signal will immediately return to full bars.


i came from an iPhone 3g on fido, and while i didn't have nearly as many dropped calls, i had a persistent issue where the phone would show full 3g signal, and calls could be placed, but data would not work unless i toggled airplane mode every few hours. i found this would happen for a month or so at a time, but then go several months with no issues. further, there are several people at my office who have iPhones, and the ones on fido would reliably start having issues at the same times as me, which made me feel like it was a carrier problem.

i called fido about my 4S and literally their only troubleshooting suggestion was to turn off 3g and see if i still dropped calls on edge. when i told them the 4S didn't have a 3g toggle in its settings, they said i'd have to take it up with apple.

so apple took a look at my phone. they *did* notice an issue where the phone was not reporting *any* phone calls to their diagnostic software, even though you could see them in my call history, so they swapped my unit.

its only been about 2 weeks since i got the replacement so its hard to draw any conclusions yet. while i did get another dropped call almost immediately after the replacement, it certainly doesn't seem to be 50% of the time now. and the fact that previous iPhone did have those sketchy diagnostic results does lend credence to there being at least something faulty with my unit. but that aside, part of me still thinks fido has serious network issues in toronto.

 

[mirzank]

Yeah, my conclusion is that its a fido issue. I really hate doing this whole handset exchange business, so i just wanted to make sure its not my set. Im leaving the countrymfor a few months so want to make sure my handset will not give me any issues. i guess worth taking in to apple to see if it shows anything in diagnostics. Unless it shows something blatantly wrong with the set though ill hold on to what i have. Ive already exchanged it once. I could be wrong but imalways thought that apple diagnostic tool was nothing more than to show them number of droped calls etc, but wont explcitly gve info on a defective component such as failty 3g chip wifi chip or battery.


I assumed since rogers owns fido maybe they use the same towers, but it seems i, wrong. Rogers seems to cater itself to more pro customers and is more exopensive, so maybe they have a more extensive network than fido.

I called fido about this as well a few times and they said they cant do anything about it so useless speaking to them.

Guess ill just have to suck it up.my phones been a lot better recently, atleast not as bad as before where out of 10-15 calls a day there were days when they alll went to vm.

If you figure something else out keep me posted, im downtown around king spadina maybe its something specific to this area? Dwntown congestion?

Oh and not sure if i mentioned this in my original post, but i used to be jailbroken till 3gs and unlocked unofficially, but with the 4 i stopped the jb and jsut got unlocked phones. I always do a restore from backup when i updated or got a new phone. I did some research and there MIgHT be some files that the backup process holds on to from the jb, so recently i backed up to icloud, and did a restore from there, and thats the only thing that helped me go from 80-90% missed calls to maybe one out of 10 missed or failed calls, and also im getting a lot less of the random signal going from full to no signal. Maybe if youre in the same boat give it a try.

@mirzank,

incredibly, your post so precisely describes my situation i had to double check that it wasn't my post!

i'm in toronto, on fido, have a 4S, and all the same issues:

-dropped calls galore (at least 50% of all calls)

-i can be standing still looking at my phone and service will suddenly disappear for 5 seconds or so and then re-appear

-whenever i legitimately go out outside service areas (like in the subway) the phone will sometimes be unable to acquire a signal when i get out. however if i toggle airplane mode on/off the signal will immediately return to full bars.


i came from an iPhone 3g on fido, and while i didn't have nearly as many dropped calls, i had a persistent issue where the phone would show full 3g signal, and calls could be placed, but data would not work unless i toggled airplane mode every few hours. i found this would happen for a month or so at a time, but then go several months with no issues. further, there are several people at my office who have iPhones, and the ones on fido would reliably start having issues at the same times as me, which made me feel like it was a carrier problem.

i called fido about my 4S and literally their only troubleshooting suggestion was to turn off 3g and see if i still dropped calls on edge. when i told them the 4S didn't have a 3g toggle in its settings, they said i'd have to take it up with apple.

so apple took a look at my phone. they *did* notice an issue where the phone was not reporting *any* phone calls to their diagnostic software, even though you could see them in my call history, so they swapped my unit.

its only been about 2 weeks since i got the replacement so its hard to draw any conclusions yet. while i did get another dropped call almost immediately after the replacement, it certainly doesn't seem to be 50% of the time now. and the fact that previous iPhone did have those sketchy diagnostic results does lend credence to there being at least something faulty with my unit. but that aside, part of me still thinks fido has serious network issues in toronto.

 

[stevemiller]

Oh and not sure if i mentioned this in my original post, but i used to be jailbroken till 3gs and unlocked unofficially, but with the 4 i stopped the jb and jsut got unlocked phones. I always do a restore from backup when i updated or got a new phone. I did some research and there MIgHT be some files that the backup process holds on to from the jb, so recently i backed up to icloud, and did a restore from there, and thats the only thing that helped me go from 80-90% missed calls to maybe one out of 10 missed or failed calls, and also im getting a lot less of the random signal going from full to no signal. Maybe if youre in the same boat give it a try.

I had actually jailbroken my 3g once; I can't remember for sure but I think my issues with data timeouts started before I ever did that, though. As for my 4S, both units were "set up as new phone" and merely synched contacts from iCloud.

I'm in the same boat where I'm betting that its a downtown network congestion issue in many of the cases, and the reduction in dropped calls since my handset swap is mostly coincidence (aka I won't be surprised if they start happening again at some random point). Also wanted to mention I remember having that issue you described on my 3G where MANY calls would go straight to voicemail, which further suggests Fido's dodgy network.

Fingers crossed they improve their infrastructure and this happens less and less over time.