iPhone 12 losing service

I’ve had two defective iPhone 12 Pro Max already. I’m on my third one now. I got it Tuesday and now it is showing signs of issues. I keep hearing that Apple frantically had to grovel to Qualcomm to get the modem chip sets for the iPhone 12 lineup. Prior to this, Apple was using cheaply made radio modem by Intel. But Intel stated to Apple that they were unable to develop a chip capable of handing 5G and subsequently dropped out of the mobile market. Let’s just say that this deal was hastily packed together. Qualcomm has a new and improved radio modem that will debut next year with the new Samsung S21 series. That is called the X60. With any luck the iPhone 13 should have it next year.

One tip I use to get the signal back when my 12Pro is Searching for a signal and the airplane mode toggle isn’t helpful:

Open the Settings app and navigate to the Cellular page, that usually brings back my signal to a couple of bars as it’s trying to populate the cellular status.

Also, here’s a video of the issue similar to what I’ve experienced. https://youtu.be/T67j9SnuXFo

After trying many different options on my own & then what Verizon and Apple had me do I finally did get a new Sim card and a new iPhone. I did not do a restore but treated it as a new phone and just individually brought apps down off of iCloud.

I still have calls dropping and times when people can’t hear me but I would say those two issues improved my reception about 50%. Meaning I have about half as many dropped calls and times when people can’t hear me. Not ideal- Still not quite as good as my old 6S plus.

I’m still debating whether I’ll keep this new Iphone.

You also can turn off the phone, remove the SIM card (be careful not to touch the gold contacts), wait a couple of minutes, then reinsert the SIM card, turn the phone back on, and allow a few minutes for a fresh network connection to be established. This should update the PRL

we have four new iphone 12 minis - two with 128Gb two with 64Gb -- the 128Gb versions had the problems the most. (we tried to set all the settings the same; activated the same day /bought the same day)

don't know if that is hardware or software but toggling off from airplane mode seems to fix it.

danield2000 wrote:

I guess you weren’t around when Apple gave free cases to IPhone 4 users, because a manufacturing defect caused the phone to lose signal when held a certain way.

It was never a manufacturing defect.

People tended to hold their phones where the antenna was, and that would reduce signal.

Tests showed the exact same thing happened with other cell phones from other manufacturers.

The problem here is that at least in the US, almost everyone with an issue has Verizon. There have been a few reports on AT&T, but they are far fewer in number.

That seems to implicate Verizon.

People in other countries have also seen their issues go completely away after switching carriers.

Thats why this still seems like a carrier issue, or a bug in one particular vendor’s cellular base station equipment.

I have been waiting for 14.4 for a while now, and hold off getting the 12 Pro Max for me and my other. So, just now I noticed 14.4 was released.

What I read, this may have fixed this issue. Please comment with 14.4 installed, so I can get my other half a new phone.

Hope all is OK after today...thank you!

I don’t think it’s a carrier issue. We were on T-Mobile when my husband and I both got new phones last month. He got an iPhone 12 mini and I got the iPhone 12 Pro Max both blue. We never had reception issues on our old iPhones but it was horrible when we got the new phones. Thinking it was a T-Mobile issue we switched to AT&T. Our service is still dropping out constantly. One bar of service at best. And we live in a major city with plenty of towers around.

It isn't Apple's issue.

Cell phones have to switch to the band/frequency the BTS tells them to use; it cannot just decide to use some other frequency or it will be stomping on the devices legitimately assigned to those other frequencies.

Imagine you are driving down a road and a police officer directs you down a different road; you can't just decide to ignore them and go a different way.

I've mentioned before it's far more likely there is one particular brand of BTS gear that has a firmware issue that causes this problem and that will need to be upgraded. Different carriers often standardize on different brands, which is why people are having more issues with certain carriers, but all carriers buy from the same handful of brands so it doesn't mean that other carriers won't have problems.

If you're curious, this is the inside of a typical BTS:

Did you have primary and 2nady set up with Verizon? Go to your setting , about, to see IMEI and ICCID numbers. I have primary and 2ndary set up and they are two different numbers, the Medi number are the same. Verizon did have to mail me a card to connect. It may help. I got replacement phone from Apple cus the connection issue. Apple gave me an open phone, which I could go any network, so I have to call in to set up the connection with Verizon, told them my problem, then they set up primary and 2ndary foe me. My phone did not loose connection since.

Happy to hear that. I am not Techinical, but my phone is working now, so speaking to Verizon, need to make sure they set up your phone connection differently, the first Rep was just setting up normally, we lost connection while I was setting up. I called back again, the 2nd rep listen to what happened and set up my phone differently. It worked since.

I know I'm pretty late to give my two cents here but i know there hasn't been much software update to the iPhone to help with this. I have the 5g variant of the iPhone 12 pro max but i use it here in Fiji so we dont really have 5g yet and still have 4g as the best option. But to the point, I suggest turning on voLTE, instead of putting the settings on 4g. I found it works to suggest my cellular connection to 3g if 4g fails instead of going off the data grid and having ne turn it off and then on again. But then, it depends on how good 3g works for you guys. I really hope its not some hardware issue from apple and can be solved from software updates later on cause it sucks to come from the Samsung note 10 into my first iPhone and having to deal with this among many other ios restricted issues and stuff. Anyways i hope that helps or you can keep turning the data off and on to reset it to the max cellular data for the next few seconds to mins itll allow. ✌️

Branta_uk wrote:

Enough to have been found walking the streets near my office to troubleshoot a mysterious call drop in the days when 3G was new technology. We found it... a defective sector antenna which had been causing problems for months. That was the antenna to which users were preferentially assigned for load balancing because it always had a low utilisation (because it dropped all calls within seconds). The indications on my phone were very similar to what you describe, lost service although the signal strength indicator looks OK, and it only hits at selected locations - anywhere else is good.

That's an engineer "bar story" if I've ever heard one - great job!!

Apple not here.

Feedback to Apple

https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Same on T-Mobile, I did found a way to get back the signal, if you connect to wifi the service recovers after a few seconds. Might be a coincidence though. I will keep testing.