Sudden ipad 3g issues

[thekb]

I have an ipad 1 that I bought new in April 2011 that has been connected to ATT 3g since purchase. Yesterday it suddenly began having trouble connecting to the cellular service. I took it to an ATT store and they replaced the SIM card, but that has had no effect on its operation.

It will *occasionally* connect to the service as I drive around town. When I try to access the web or something, it always says unable to connect, but then out of the blue, I will sometimes hear the chime that it downloaded new email so I know it somehow managed to connect. Its like the antenna has extremely reduced power and maybe only when I pass the strongest towers is it able to make the connection.

I am outside my warranty period so I can't even talk to Apple about it. I already tried resetting the network connection to no avail. Has anyone else heard of the radios just dying or suddenly losing 95% of their strength? Would restoring the ipad help? If so, what exactly are the instructions for doing that?

 

[thekb]

Contacted ATT today to check and see if there have been any outages in my area, but there have been none. It appears the problem lies with my ipad. Has anyone known of this occurrence before?

 

[Fruit Cake]

Have you tried reset network connections ?

 

[number84]

I'm having similar issues with my iPad 3. Only fix is to reset network settings as above poster mentioned. But strange as I have to do this at least once per day now. I even went to restore my iPad last night, but then again I had the issue again today. Mine is jailbroken though. Going to monitor for a few more days to see if it gets any better. If not, might restore without jailbreak for a few days and see how that goes.

Otherwise, it's gotta be network related...can't see it being software related as why would it happen all of a sudden. I've been using it since Day 1 launch of the iPad 3 with no issues. Suppose it could be hardware related, but why would resetting cure it?

 

[thekb]

Yep. Reset the network connection first thing.

So about the only thing I have left to try is to 'restore', right? Is there anything else I can try? Any chance that will fix it?

It's the darndest thing. I used to get at least 4 bars of signal strength everywhere and now I sometimes get one and most times it reads no service. I find it very odd that it would kinda work, instead of just completely dying. If it goes bad, I would expect it to just crap out.

 

[ixodes]

One of our iPads at work did this very same thing about three weeks ago. When I checked back, our IT guy had simply done a restore and all was fine after that.