5g not working since iOS 16.4 upgrade

There are no carrier settings in India. Our phones are not tied to a cellular plan. We are free to change carriers as we like. This is a problem across all the carriers for all my friends in India.

Your 5G settings should look like this:

Use 5G with your iPhone - Apple Support

Carrier Settings are definitely used in India (and everywhere else) - they don't lock your iPhone to a carrier, rather they are what allow your phone to be used with a carrier - they're essentially a preferences file for the network of the carrier you are currently using.

Correct. Except, that 5G standalone toggle is completely missing. Is it still carrier's mistake?

If your carrier account is not setup to offer 5G service that option may not appear even grayed out.

Do you still see the other 5G options?

For example, if I set the Voice & Data option to “LTE,” the greyed-out “5G Standalone” option also disappears.

5G

5G was perfectly working fine before updating to 16.4 It stopped after updating to 16.4

Contact your carrier.

If you believe your carrier has nothing to do with it, contact Apple Support directly:

Contact – Official Apple Support (IN)

Found the solution. It's problem with iOS itself. Go to reset and reset network settings. It will restart the phone and the problem is solved.

Didn’t help me. I’ve done that twice now

I’ll get 5G and 5GUWB on my iPhone 14 Pro (iOS 16.4.1 [20E252]) , but I feel like 4G LTE shows up more often than before.

Whereas previously 5G was the norm and 4G LTE was very seldom.

Yes, on Verizon Wireless. Says my modem firmware is 1.67.04

Again, contact your cellular carrier.

The cellular tower has complete control over whether you are assigned to a 5G band or not depending upon congestion and other factors.

5G stopped working for me as well. I only get LTE connectivity. Tried rebooting device, airplane mode, resetting network settings, no results. And I know it’s not a carrier issue, because I swapped my SIM card with another iPhone and 5G worked on the other device. And I haven’t even updated my iOS recently, it just stopped working.

Another iPhone of the exact same model?

If so, you may want to have your phone examined.

If not, you can't directly compare say, an iPhone 13 against an iPhone 12 with the same SIM card; the capabilities of the devices are different, and that's where carrier configuration of your local cell tower comes into play.

I really don't see the point of you constantly defending the iPhone and blaming everything on the carrier. Just searching through the internet it becomes obvious that people encounter this problem, irrespective of the service provider, iPhone model, iOS version, location etc., and it's not just a one time thing for one person. If you can't admit that iPhone's software may be the problem, I'd recommend you to stay away from this discussion.

I personally did a hard restore of iOS on my iPhone and lo and behold - 5G icon is back. Obviously, not a lot of people would actually want to go through the whole process of backing up their iPhone, downloading the software, restoring the phone to factory settings, and then restoring their backup just to get 5G instead of LTE. But this just proves that there is an issue in iPhone software, that glitches and makes 5G unavailable.

Let's see, millions of people with the same phone and the same carrier running the same version of iOS are not experiencing the problem.

That puts it squarely in the carrier's camp and some type of issue with your local tower and towers and/or your account.

If you believe it's the software, feel free to lodge a complaint with Apple here:

Feedback - iPhone - Apple

Meanwhile I will be here giving the same advice, as most people who have had this issue resolved have done so after working through it with their cellular carrier.

I'm glad a hard reset worked for you.