Sim Card Failure No Sim with iPhone 4S Anyone Else?

Hey guys! here is an update from me:

I asked my friend in the States to call on my behalf to Apple Customer Care and ask what is the solution for the problem with connection I am having. Their reply shocked my friend and me. They said that Apple has upgraded the hardware of the iPhone4s and it might not support some simcards offered by different carriers, meaning that we should use the latest simcards only... what if we are not in the States and my carrier offers only one type of simcard??? The Apple techinican said that in this case there is nothing much I can do about it. 😟 No solution of this problem can be offered my Apple. He asked to address my concerns to my Service provider in my country.

APPLE *****!!!!

Hi All,

SIM Failure - INVALID SIM is happening to me about 3 times a day.

I spoke to a guy in another forum who suggested that it could be the gold SIM card contacts shorting on the metal SIM card tray.

I had a look at my SIM last night, and the contacts seem to be almost touching the metal tray.

I think this is the problem - so the latest SIM card advice mentioned above seems the way forward...

Matt

Manchester UK

Dear Matt

I am afraid this is not the case. First of all, on ios 5.0 sim worked. Second, I managed to find micro sim card which did not touch metall cage of sim card holder for sure and with this sim card phone behaved the same way.

Hi

This is bad news!

It was happening on iOS 5.0, I updated to 5.0.1 (I think) and nothing has changed...

Do you think it is an OS issue?

Have Apple published ANYTHING about this problem? I can see that around 100,00 people have viewed threads in Apple forums alone on this issue.

Matt

I do not know true this or not, but for those who has 128k sim cards and up problem do not exists. At least 3 another iPhones 4s with modern sims work good but in another carrier network. I did not try my iPhone with them yet.

i have had about 6 invalid SIM or No SIM errors in the first 24 hrs with an ATT 4s supplied with SIM. Intermittently all systems work, and restarting or resetting often fixes the problem - for a little while. It is distressing and, if it continues, it means I will have to change - perhaps back to the previous iphone which never gave me any such probems.

Follow up: went to Apple store, they ran a diagnostic, and replaced the handset. Problem lingered. I went to AT&T, they replaced the SIM. All's good now. Not sure if it was a combination of bad SIM/bad hardware, but I was taken care of.

-End of line.

I've been having this issue for about a month but it only happened three times.

The last one was this morning: the phone was recharging in its dock. When I woke up, it showed the "SIM failure" popup.

I never tried ejecting and putting back in the SIM, I always rebooted the phone and the SIM always started to work again.

My SIM is 2 years old, it's a 128k SIM and from the pattern of the contacts I'd say it's the new type. Still the issue occasionally shows up.

I'm not sure if it showed up in iOS 5.0 too. I'm now running 5.0.1.

On my iPhone 4 never had this kind of problems and I have been running iOS 5 beta since the first release.

It seems to me a hardware related issue, but it would be great to hear something from Apple...

I got a new 4S and a new SIM card. The problem started to show up a couple of weeks after updating to iOS 5.0.1 (mid of November).

The SIM card is not the issue. I can reliably reproduce the issue and have a Bug Report open with Apple.

As soon as the signal goes down to 1 or 2 bars and stay this way for 15-20 minutes, the "SIM Error" shows up.

I produced some crash dumps and sent them to Apple last night (Baseband related dumps) and hope enough is in them to nail the issue.

If the signal is good (3+ bars) I don't see the problem at all.

Apple Bug-Reporter ID: 10490301

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Stefan.

Got the 128k simcard today, but they only had it in regular sim. The connector itself is almost larger than the microsim, so don't really want to break anything by cutting. How do you cut these huge simcards? It looks like the one on the picture "working", so I bet it would work if I could get it to fit in.

Just go mayhem on the card?

-Erlend

From a whitepaper by one of the leading manufacturers of SIM/USIM cards, Gemalto:

"There is a high chance that handset manufacturers, for economic reasons, will eventually stop supporting the SIM in their coming new 3G devices. As a consequence, if a 3G subscriber inserts a 2G SIM into a brand new 3G device, it will fail to connect to the network. There are examples where the SIM card becomes inactive in such conditions. In such circumstances, the 3G mobile operator stands to lose both current revenue on voice traffic and the potential revenue on new data services. To ensure quality of service for its new 3G customers, a major operator in France has proactively replaced their users SIM with 3G USIM cards: When sending a new 3G phone pack (including a USIM) to their current customers, this operator requested the user to insert the new 3G USIM into the new phone. The operator also warned the user that inserting a SIM into the new 3G phone could damage the SIM and crash the 3G phone software."

You can find the whitepaper here: http://www.gemalto.com/dwnld/5291_3G_network_WP_v4.pdf

I suspect that Apple (or more likely Qualcomm's chipset) may have stopped supporting 2G SIMs in the iPhone 4S. But that doesn't explain why it is working for some people and not others on the same network!?

Apple??? Answers please!

@sschulte yep, you probably right, but in my case, after switched to a new sim card (same carrier) no more sim failure, my friend's phone also have no problem even at 5.0 or 5.0.1. At some area on my house the signal bars decrease to only one bar and yet no sim failure for more than half an hour, so i guess its not about the ios, but the sim reader on the iphone 4s is not accepting all kind of range of sim cards that used to be work fine under iphone 4.

@earthland i actually cut them manually, because i used to do that for my previous iphone4 ;-)

Hehe, yep. Works well now at least, never had it last this long before without any type of whining from the phone. The apple store here said they wouldn't cut into the sim, saying I had to wait for the microsim version to come to Telenor. But just used some surgical skillz and cut really carefully. The chip was almost as big as the microsim itself, hence it was kind of risky to cut it. (thats why they didn't recommend it)

Nice to have a working phone for now at least!

(Hope I don't jinx it)

-Erlend

This afternoon the issue showed up again in my 4s.

I tried removing the SIM (first time I tried that) and the phone didn't recognize the card being pulled out and pushed back in; not even after several retries.

It was just as if the hadrware had been locked up in SIM Failure state and the phone was stuck in it, even without any SIM plugged in.

After a reboot it worked and as of now it never gave the no SIM error again.

So how could it be the SIM?

Seems like after the issue shows up, the phone never checks again on the SIM tray. Could it be a power issue on the SIM tray circuitry? The tray gets no power, the phone can't read the SIM and if you reboot the device, the tray gets its power back and all goes back to normal, until the next power outage.

This may have something to do with battery issues. Maybe there's a leakage in power circuits that drains the batteries and sometimes causes the SIM tray to be powered off.

I can rule that out in my case. Even when the iPhone 4s is in the Dock and get loaded all the time, I see the SIM ERROR showing up once the I stay with 1-2 bars for a longer time (usually between 15-20 minutes).

And I didn't have the issue with iOS 5.0.0 so the folks in Cupertino broke something in the baseband part of iOS with iOS 5.0.1

As far as "No word from Apple..." goes, they may read the posts but the right way to get their attention is to file a Bug Report for them as this is not a support channel but a user-to-user discussion board.

I am sure they know exactly how many people are currently upset with the iPhone 4s and work hard on getting things sorted.

Stefan

P.S. No, I don't own Apple shares nor do I work for them or a related company.