Why does my cell phone show "no service" periodically for a few hours?

Here’s the question: is this a network/coverage problem or a hardware problem (signaling that my phone is about to go belly-up).

My carrier is T-Mobile. I’m using a BlackBerry Key2, running on Android 8.1.0, the latest OS this phone can use. I’ve had the phone since July 2018 and I love it.

This morning the screen showed “no service” for several hours. I did all the stuff you’re supposed to do, i.e., rebooted lots of times, turned airplane mode off and on before and after rebooting, took the sim card out and put it back in again, tinkered with settings. I even got in the car and drove around looking for coverage, thinking it might be a glitch at my house. No luck there.

Then like magic, service just reappeared. Usually service reappears quite soon, after only a couple of reboots. This time it took hours. I don’t think anything I did made it come back. I think it was an anomaly, but a network anomaly or a hardware anomaly?

This service disappearance/reappearance has happened about three times in the last few months; I’ve been with T-Mobile about a year. Before that I was with AT&T but ditched them after this 5G baloney. Also, T-Mobile has an Old People’s rate of only $50/mo. :older_adult:t4:

Any ideas?

That phone is almost certainly dying.

:sob: I was afraid of that…

The one thing I’ve found that can help when the radio goes out on a phone is to do a cold reboot. Don’t just tap restart, but hold the button down until the phone shuts off. That forces it to do a full reboot.

Granted, I’ve not had the cellular signal go out. Just the wi-fi and Bluetooth. But I was surprised at how much better than worked than trying a regular restart. I was ready to have to go buy another phone.

I did turn the phone all the way off with the “power off” option several times. (In addition to “restarting” several times.) Is that the same thing as what you’re saying?

If it has only happened a few times in several months, perhaps the network was down? You say you drove around in the car looking for coverage, and I’m not sure what you mean by this - were you inferring from the fact that you did not pick up a signal that the network was not the problem? But perhaps towers were out for a few hours over a large area. Do you have a positive control to better rule out this possibility - i.e. a neighbor with a phone on the same network who can confirm that they did not lose reception?

No, I’m saying to force it off by holding the button down until it restarts. You don’t choose any menu items at all.

It’s basically equivalent to just removing the battery (or unplugging a computer), rather than doing a proper shutdown.

In my experience, a proper shutdown seems to trigger “fast loading” when the phone restarts. An improper shutdown makes it go through the whole slow loading procedure, where it shows the progress bar as the phone boots.

Yes, I think this is the usual method (almost universal?) to force a full reboot on electronic devices. I recently discovered that it even works with the remote to force my TV to reboot (TVs have very few buttons these days).

Yes, I assumed that if coverage in my house was spotty, then I’d be able to pick up a signal driving around. When I moved to this house I had Sprint as my carrier, but I had to dump it because I was in roaming in my own living room. (!) I don’t get good OTA TV reception either.* So it seemed a reasonable assumption that the problem was my location.

All of this happened around 7 am, so I wasn’t in a position to call any neighbors. Besides, without a working phone-- you can’t call anyone! :woman_facepalming:t4:



Okay, I will definitely keep that in mind! Ignorance fought.



* The relevance of that comment is that this is kind of an electronic dead zone.

Maybe not unrelated to this?

Changes in their service can mean changes in the signal reception for specific frequencies and specific tower locations.

From the OP-

??

If you do live in a semi-rural area with spotty coverage due to hills & dales, and a low population density, your signal at home may well depend on a single tower. Which tower will not be a high priority to repair versus one downtown that’s servicing thousands of customers, not 53.

So if by “driving around” you meant the local neighborhood and your phone didn’t recover I’m now less convinced the phone is going bad versus you just being in a crappy low priority spot. OTOH, if you drove a few miles to the local town center, be that a village or a metropolis, and your phone still didn’t recover signal, that I’d blame on the phone.

I have a friend who lives in the hilly ruralia to the NW of Fort Worth. From a hill near her house you can see easily the skyscrapers of FTW. But out there on the half-square mile ranchettes, cell service sucks for every carrier. They can’t make money building that many towers to reach into each hollow for that few people.

Depending on your carrier and how new your phone is, Wi-Fi Calling may be the solution if you have a weak cell signal where you live or work. Basically, it sends your cell calls over the WiFi network.

From when I did this full time, I am fully aware of several outages that would affect a tower or even a region for a few hours. It wasn’t frequent but it did happen. You have done all the the normal steps (and a well done to you @ThelmaLou, but you’ve managed equally well in other such threads before!) - so what I would look for is to see if the issue reoccurs / becomes more frequent.

At or around once a month, I wouldn’t worry, probably half were a network hiccup, and the other was a phone hiccup, if it comes back after a quick restart, most likely the later than the former, but both can cause that error. If it keeps happening, you could try a new SIM, but I wouldn’t bother - you switched carriers recently enough that I couldn’t imagine a SIM failure in that timeframe without physical or water damage, and you’d have probably seen it when re-inserting.

for the record, this is T-Mobile’s issue specific troubleshooting flow (in the day I’d have sent this to you as a ‘do first’ if the issue reoccurs) and I believe you’ve pretty much done it all.

Since you have BYOD (bring your own device) that’ll limit the troubleshooting tech support can do for you, but you can still use the ‘contact us’ from that flow via a different device and see if it’s a known outage. That includes online chat, and at least from when I was doing it, there was a dedicated twitter and facebook team that could follow the flow for online troubleshooting via DM. IF you have another device to do so of course.

If you have that option, I’d normally use it to do a fast check to see if it was a local/tower issue, because if so, the rest of the troubleshooting isn’t going to do much.

The only other thing I can say, is depending on your area, a single tower can cover up to a 45 mile radius (HUGE number of factors of course). If you’re in an area serviced by a single tower that burps, even driving around quite a distance may be keeping you in the same area of effect.

LASTLY (I promise) if it happens again for any length, another way to check is to ask if those around you who are on T-Mobile as well are having the same issue. If the answer is yes, well, you know what’s going on. If they have service but you don’t… Phone problems.

I live in an urban neighborhood near downtown. Coverage is aimed at booming, heavily populated areas away from here. At least that’s what I think.



@ParallelLines thanks for that long reply. I love long replies. This

wouldn’t surprise me at all.

I will mark your post for future reference.

That advice is also good for computers. My laptop regularly loses its Bluetooth. Over the weekend it lost its Wi-Fi. A cold reboot has always solved the problem.

Yeah, you may be on the fringe of coverage by a very small number of towers. And then be at the mercy of how many other people are active at that time.

I was a lead software engineer on cell phones for about 12 years, although I left the business before your phone was made.
From the phone’s perspective, the kind of hardware issue you’d have would likely be a flaky connection. Not the sort of thing that persists for many hours, and then goes away for a long time. Depending on how the antennas are set up in that phone, it’s theoretically possible to get a little foreign material in the antenna connection, and then have that shake free later. That could mimic your scenario.

I could also concoct some strange scenarios that would account for a software interaction. You could have corrupted some calibration data, which would make camping on the network harder. This can kinda self correct, if you get lucky and get a strong enough signal to work even without good calibration. But I consider that fairly unlikely.

If I had to bet based on what’s been said in this thread, and my out-of-date architectural info, I’d go with network issue.

Thanks. I appreciate hearing from people who are or have been in the industry.

This has been my thinking.

I’m shocked a phone from 2018 can still get service. It has to be 3g.

I have several 3g and 4g phones that we use on our home wi-fi. They’re fine for web browsing and YouTube.

Saves wear and tear on my new 5g phone battery.

I feel the OP’s pain. I like small phones. Sadly the new models get bigger screens every year. They don’t even fit in the pocket.

You’re kidding, right?