iPhone 11 - Went to No Service "Phone Not Allowed"

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iPhone 11 - Went to No Service "Phone Not Allowed"

Yesterday I was using my Red iPhone 11 at work and was on WiFi so I didn't noticed it went offline. When I got into my car, I tried to call my girlfriend and it kept saying call failed. Swiping down to see the network status it says "No Service". I go into Settings>General>About>Network and it says Not Available, pressing it says "Phone Not Allowed". So I took the sim out and put it in my purple iPhone 11, works fine, all my missed SMS messages and MMS messages suddenly appear.

I then put the active Tmobile sim in the Red phone and No Service. Did a restart, reset network settings, toggle to 3G, nothing works. It's been running on 13.3.1 without a hitch until now so it's not a software update issue.

I checked to see if my IMEI was Blacklisted and it's not.

I followed all the trouble-shooting steps (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201415) to fix this and nothing is working. I did a full Restore, skip through the new phone setup and not log into iCloud, set the network to 3G and still no service. It recognizes the Sim as Mint Mobile, but it won't connect to the network no matter what sim I put in. So now I'm back to using my old 5s. I looked through others with this issue (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250692743?page=4) and it seems they gave up, I couldn't find someone reporting a solution.

When I moved my Mint sim to the other iPhones, all my missed MMS's suddenly came in.

Would appreciate suggestions before taking it to the Apple store. I have a feeling it's either the antenna or one of the chips inside are going bad.

[Edited by Moderator]

iPhone

Posted on Feb 19, 2020 7:38 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 19, 2020 7:50 AM in response to cooidude0

As the hosts have cleaned up your rant a little, I’ll offer this:

How did you check to see if your IMEI is blacklisted (which is what that symptom normally means)? There is only ONE way to check reliably. That is this link in the US—>CTIA Stolen Phone Checker

And the most obvious thing to do is to call your carrier and ask if there is a problem with your phone’s registration on their network.

Most hardware problems would result in a message that says “Searching…”, not “Phone not allowed”.

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Answer 2

Feb 19, 2020 8:09 AM in response to cooidude0

Have you tried restoring the phone to factory settings, without restoring a backup?

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings - Apple Support

If the phone still has a problem then it’s clearly a hardware problem. If it works and you then restore a backup and the problem returns you have a corrupt backup.

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Answer 3

Courcoul

Level 6

18,770 points

Feb 19, 2020 8:11 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

On that line of thought, was the phone dropped or compromised recently?

Also, assuming there exists a known-good backup at hand, have you tried wiping it clean (Erase All Contents And Settings) and setting it up as a new phone to see if it works then?

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Answer 4

Courcoul

Level 6

18,770 points

Feb 19, 2020 8:30 AM in response to cooidude0

If there is some sort of misconfiguration or corruption in the phone (and hence the backup) at the software level, restoring will only faithfully restore it back, hence the suggestion to start afresh just to do the test.

Let's say Best Buy is not held to high regards in these parts, based on known results. Maybe try at an Apple Store instead?

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Answer 5

cooidude0 Author

Level 1

15 points

Feb 20, 2020 12:46 PM in response to BORg529

It's a T-Mobile MVNO owned by actor Ryan Reynolds. Mintmobile.com , hard to beat their rates, but I'll probably switch to T-mobile or someone else in a few months.

I went to Best Buy and confirmed, they can only run a basic diagnostic on the phone, otherwise, they'd have to mail it out to be looked at. The guy I worked with was cool, he suggested to go to the Apple Store and not waste my time with them sending it out.

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Answer 6

BORg529

Level 4

3,070 points

Feb 19, 2020 9:02 AM in response to cooidude0

Are you using iPhone 11 for work, or for personal use? It is better to take Phone a real Apple Store, AASP like Best Buy, people having issues with them in this forum.

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Answer 7

cooidude0 Author

Level 1

15 points

Feb 19, 2020 8:17 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

Lawrence, yes, I did an iTunes Restore without backup, no change. Right now my phone is completed restored to factory settings and not logged into Apple. I'm afraid to do a Restore because of what happened to my iPhone 7 Plus on Verizon. It's a paid off phone, unlocked, used on a few different carriers. I put my Mint sim in it to confirm MMS works. I then applied my backup to it to confirm MMS stops working (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251111282). So I did an iTunes Restore and the message came up Sim Not Supported. I then tried the previous sims from the 3 different carriers that this phone was used on and now none of them work with this phone. I'm afraid of having this same thing happen to this iPhone 11.

Thanks again for your replies and working with me, you've been very helpful.

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Answer 8

cooidude0 Author

Level 1

15 points

Feb 19, 2020 8:25 AM in response to Courcoul

No, the phone was on my desk at work all day. Prior to that, it's always been in an Otterbox and hasn't been dropped on a hard surface, or exposed to water or excessive heat.

Complete iTunes restore didn't make any difference. Reset All Network Settings, Setting Cellular to 3G, toggling Airplane Mode on/off, etc.

I scheduled an appointment at Best Buy to look at it. Hopefully they can determine if it's a hardware issue or not.

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Answer 9

cooidude0 Author

Level 1

15 points

Feb 19, 2020 7:58 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

Yeah sorry about that, it was frustrating in my previous post about the MMS issue I'm having.

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Answer 10

Courcoul

Level 6

18,770 points

Feb 19, 2020 8:02 AM in response to cooidude0

Disregard.

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Answer 11

cooidude0 Author

Level 1

15 points

Feb 19, 2020 8:06 AM in response to cooidude0

Lawrence, that CTIA site also confirmed the phone is clean. It is strange how my phone went from working to No Service like it did.

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Answer 12

cooidude0 Author

Level 1

15 points

Feb 19, 2020 10:14 AM in response to Courcoul

Courcoul, thanks for the heads up on Best Buy, I had hopes they might be able to do something, but sounds like I need to visit my local Apple Store.

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Answer 13

BORg529

Level 4

3,070 points

Feb 19, 2020 12:13 PM in response to cooidude0

Okay. My bad. I should have ask earlier, what is Mint, I never heard of it. It belongs to foreign country wireless carrier?

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Answer 14

cooidude0 Author

Level 1

15 points

Feb 19, 2020 7:57 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

Lawrence, thanks for the followup, that is definitely more helpful than how it went in my previous post on here, and 6 hours on the phone with senior apple techs. The Level 10's were saying "carrier, carrier" but Apple confirmed it was NOT the carrier, it's something in my backup that will disable MMS on any iPhone that it's restored to.

I logged into Swappa and used a free Blacklist check. I also called Tmobile and they confirmed the IMEI is clean. Thanks for the link, I'll give that a try.

It goes from Searching to No Service within a few seconds. Switching from the Mint sim to an active Tmobile sim didn't make any difference.

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iPhone 11 - Went to No Service "Phone Not Allowed"

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