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

Same problem @ Vodafone, Czech republic... Got new SIM, but problem appears again.. usually at places with low signal (but it may be only illusion 🙂)

too bad, this is my first iPhone, its really awesome, but (for now) its not a phone, im "on" signal about 50% of day due to "SIM not work" problem.. and this is far away from my idea of cell phone 🙂

im looking forward to Apple's solution (im betting on now firmware)..

but im happy that im not alone 🙂

Hi all. Just a quick update, to my last posting. Called Apple tech support today. After explaining this sim problem, and doing A few tests over phone. Which did not work. Had to Call back again. And this time we did a complete restore through computer and iTunes. This has not worked either. Called Apple again. And now got to return it to Apple for check/repair. If still no good they said they will replace the phone. Apparently, the tech guy said there have been the same problems With the iPhone 3G,3GS, and iPhone 4. If this is so wide spread why haven't they sorted it?. Come on Apple get your finger out. O, and by the way. Got my sim in Samsung s3, using the cradle. And I haven't had a glitch since.

UPDATE...

So I told you about my old (4-5 years old) prepaid SIM card and I gave it a shot and have been using it for the last 36 or so hours.

Last nigh, Sunday at 9:55 pm my 4S was fully charged (100%) and I used it for a while before I went to sleep. When I woke up at 7:07am 97% was left on battery then I went on the regular Monday and now it's right around 6:10pm Monday evening and I still have 77% left, all I can say is Unbelievable that it seems to be so simple yet so difficult to fix. The old SIM did the trick, I do not have any technical details on it but it's like I said 4-5 years old. Incoming, outgoing calls, SMS and all works like it should. I think of my self as an average user (check e-mail, weather, stock, online, SMS, calls, Bluetooth OFF, weather and stocks ON in notifications, all e-mail set to manual, location services OFF, brightness at 50%)

As I also informed you earlier my phone operator/carrier said the same thing in regards to iPhone 4S not working properly with some SIM cards and how they were going to send out the new SIMs to the 4S users with these types of problems so hopefully the new SIM works as well as my prepaid one. And yes there is a difference on the chip between these two SIMs, so if you get a replacement SIM and they look the same it will probably not help you.

Will keep you updated how it goes on and if the new SIM they promised will help and work as well as my prepaid.

I have just given back my iPhone4s as the service went from bad to absolutely unbearable. It went from rebooting twice a day to almost every hour....I agree with those who say that they had no problem with the phone prior to the update. Mine had no issue at all even with Battery life which I didn't find any different from my previous iPhone 4....but after the update from 5.0 to 5.01, "sim not Valid", No Service, Text message failure, call connection failure, confused Siri became part of the normal day of life. I tried to bare with it hoping that Apple would address the issue and provide an update urgently but after almost a month of and watching all the blogs going on and no response....I came to the conclusion that our number is to insignificant compared to the number of sales that Apple iPhone 4s sold world wide mine included as I was one of the first to get from Kenya for them to be to bothered with trying to provide an urgent answer to our dilemma.

But sincerely weren't we part of the contributing group of people that helped them reach that 4million marker. Some of us have had to pay a whole lot more than our American counterparts to get this phone and its sad that in a world where competition is becoming stiff and where word of mouth from users works faster than any advertisement agency in moving products that at our point of need of assistance and direction someone at Apple can claim that they are not aware of this problem when we blog through their support group site....how is this possible?

Further more how is it that this issue has been going on for almost more than a month and its even in various tabloids that write about smart phones and no one at Apple has picked up on or made comment about it...what now seems to be in circulation is the rumors about the next iPhone 5 and iPad 3 or the battles raging with Motorola in France, the iPad rights in China and Samsung debacle in Germany......continued in part two of this convo

continued from first part of this convo......and US......what about the 100,000 odd unhappy clients who are writing in this blog and seemingly telling Apple in an indirect way that we don't want to give up on Apple that we like their products...actually not like...but are proud of their products....but this issue has the potential to break the camel's back if not dealt with it properly...whatever the reason for it....you (Apple) may be making good sales right now.....but surely the amount of unhappy people in this forum concerning the common issue shared, if not assisted and eventually if they give up...reluctantly...would have no positive information to tell would be potential buyers...cause more than anything else to sell effectively nothing, I am sure you will agree beats experience...and despite all the marketing strategy or billions of money spent on advertising peoples experience and positive sharing about the product in their immediate environment is what moves the products off the shelf.....agree or disagree....can you accept a drop in sales of 1,000,000 given that the rule of thumb states that for every one client lost 10 go with them?

I don't want to change phones to a different brand but how long can I and the rest of the aggravated clients in this forum continue to endure the related issues and pretend that we can live with it when no solution seems in sight or suffer the silence from Apple which would seem to indicate that we are too insignificant to warrant any attention.

People blogging here have tried to come up with all sorts of theories, suggestions and solutions and I truly appreciate their input but the only person who can provide us with the answer & solution we need is Apple...and the longer they take to respond to the matter...the more the decision is left into our hands to determine whether to keep on waiting for a solution that might never come or abandon ship....and really sad to say this...buy into the competition?

I hope we don't have to chose and Apple care enough to step up.

One more for invalid sim. The problem appeared after a month of careful use, I woke up in the morning to find out invalid sim message instead of orange uk. Neither reboot, nor resetting network settings/whole phone didn't help. I went to the orange shop and replaced the sim card yesterday, registered it today, and within few hours sim failure started appearing again, however, now resetting network keeps the phone running for a few minutes.

Also, the previous (faulty) card is refusing to work in my old phone, so, i assume it is both hardware and software problem, and 4s somehow learned how to kill sim cards.

Now that this thread has reached 40 pages it has become pretty impossible to read through all the posts. But, clearly there is something going on with the iPhone and the sim card for more than just a couple people. After reading a fair number of posts, I get the feeling that this sim problem might be generated by a whole list of causes...software?, hardware?, bad sim cards?, bad sim card placement in its slot?, a dirty sim card slot?, etc. Different things seem to work for different people and some people have had no luck getting anything to work.

We own 3 iPhone 4s' in our family. My wife and I have had no sim card problems since getting the phones over a month ago. But, last week my daughter received the feared "Sim Failure" notification on her iphone 4S. Along with that, there was "No Service." We are on the Verizon network. Since the "fix" some have had success with (at least temporarily) has been to shut off the iPhone (not sleep...OFF) and then turn it back on I tried that. Boom, her phone had a restored connection to the Verizon network and her iPhone has been fine for a week since then.

We are pretty diligent in our house about regularly Shutting Down our MacBook Pros and not just putting them to sleep. Maybe about 3 times a week. We have been told often that this is "Best Practice" by the tech department where my wife and I teach. We USED to do the same with our pre-iPhone 4S cell phones for the same reason. But, since getting our iPhone 4S' we have not completely shut them down nearly as often as we are doing the "plug in at night iCloud backup thing." Nevertheless, I have shut my phone down regularly enough. I have done the same for my wife's iPhone. But, it crossed my mind that I have let my daughter be in charge of her iPhone. Since I told her to plug in her phone at night to initiate the auto backup I was curious about when she had last shut down her phone. She said..."Never." So, for over a month my daughter's phone was never shut down.

It could be a total fluke that her phone had the "Sim Failure" and she had never shut down her phone, but it could also be that one of the several ways to generate a "Sim Failure" on the iPhone 4S is to never shut it down in order to allow it to "clear out the bad and bring in the good." When I called Apple Care about this, they recommended I go back to shutting down the iPhone about 3 times a week as we had done with previous cell phones and see what happens. They in no way implied that this was the universal fix for the sim problem. But, they did say that in my case it may be the reason for my daughter's "Sim Failure" as it is fairly common for phones that are never shut down to eventually develop a whole range of functionality problems.

Sorry, this has been very long winded. But, I didn't want to post something and advertise it as more than it is. The fact is, a segment of the population that are experiencing "Sim Failures" may be having the problem because they are not shutting off their phones on a somewhat regular basis. Maybe once a week is enough. Maybe more. I have no idea. I'm going with 2-3 for now and see if my daughter's phone becomes "Sim Failure" free. As I said, my daughter's iPhone 4S has been "Sim Failure Free" for a week now. I will repost if her phone fails again despite more conscientious shutting down of the phone.

Further news from my dealing with Tele2 Sweden. Sent them the phone back for repair/exchange 10 days ago, got a new phone back last Friday with 5.0.0. Same problem with/without new carreer settings update, with/without 5.0.1 upgrade. Tried with 3 SIM cards from the operator.

So now I get to send the phone back, again, for another round of repair/exchange. I might get to cancel my order if they cannot fix it two more times. They claim that they have iPhone 4s customers with no issues. So either it's a SIM card batch problem or an iPhone batch problem. No matter which one, they don't seem to have pinpointed said batch yet.

So now I am back to using the LG Optimus 2x, the phone which restarts 3 times a day, and crashes when left to charge overnight on a stock ROM... Well done Apple.

Clever move as I had no problem with 5.0 when i got my phone...not even with the battery....all went south after that...into the 41st page and I am begining to feel like we're guinea pigs for some sick experiment in which we locked into a room until...WE...come up with the solution...as we fish around!....

That's right decision! No reason to do update because 5.0.1 give nothing good - only bad things.... I was on 5.0 one day - everything was good but I did a stupid thing... And now I have a very expensive Ipod...

UPDATE...

Some 48 hours or two days later since my last full charge and normal use I still have 35% left on my iPhone 4S with that OLD SIM card I talked about in my last few posts.

To those of you living in Sweden and having this issue with Tele2 including BaroqueW please give Tele2 a call and tell them you want a new SIM, apparently Tele2 has fixed this issue created by iPhone 4S and is sending these newly designed SIM cards that should fix the No Service, Searching for network, Invalid SIM and on...

My OLD SIM card works great and I sure hope this new one fixes the issues. But for time being I forwarded my calls to the old SIM card and make calls from it and so far so good. So let's see what happens with this new SIM. I should get it in 2-3 days according to Tele2 of Sweden.

Will keep you updated with this new SIM...

For those of you living in Sweden the old SIM is from Conviq Kontantkort (4-5 years old) and works great

I got the iPhone 4S on the day of release, have updated to the latest iOS version and have the same problem. In fact the invalid sim errors are becoming more frequent each day. Already this evening my phone has shown the error message 3 times in the space of about 4 hours. Switching the phone off and on seems to help for a couple of hours. Must say that this is frustrating. Vodafone are saying that it may be a glitchy sim card but judging from the replies on this thread it seems the error probably lies with Apple. This really needs a fix as currently my phone is useless as a phone.

Just wanted to add my $0.02

I have had my 4s since the first day available. I upgraded to 5.0.1 as soon as it was released. No issues until 3 days ago.

Started with "invalid sim" message. Reboot would fix for 1st day.

Then got "no sim" message. I removed and tried to clean my sim, reinsert, reboot, airplane mode, sync with iTunes. Still "no sim".

Then I removed the sim and installed it in my old 3GS (using a micro sim adapter). It also displays "no sim"

Then I cut my old sim (from 3GS) down to micro sim size, and I installed it in my 4s.

Now says "no service"

Called AT&T and tried to get them to switch my service back to my old phone, untill issues resolved.

Was told I would have to go to AT&T store to get a new sim, they could not re-activate my old one.

Stopped by AT&T today and got a new micro sim card. The customer service rep said that sometimes there is a problem with the sim card and it needs to be replaced.

My 4s has been working for over 8 hours now, with no sim messages!

mrgdwrench,

If my daughters iPhone 4S displays the "Sim Failure" logo again, I will use your experience and go to Verizon and have an new sim card installed. I think this represents a very reasonable solution track for a fair number of folks having to deal with this issue. Thanks for sharing this with all of us.

Mr. Luigi

I've started having the same issue. In the last 3 days, I get 'Invalid SIM' coming up regularly. A reset fixes it for a few hours.

I spoke to Vodafone would said the phone must be faulty and that I should send it in for repair. I've asked them to send a new SIM to try that first.