Q: iPhone 4S "no service" problem

Apple just made 46$ Billion this quarter.  They've got your money and don't care it seems.

Don't support Apple when you buy your next phone. I know I won't. With all this money they could get some real good engineers to solve all the issues within a more timely manner... less than 4+ months thats for sure!  We are approaching February. iPhone 4S and iOS 5 was released in October.   They must have a lot of issues to work out as it is taking forever to come up with real fixes that work!

@patbehn. Good to know that! I hope there will be solution soon.

@ bl. Yeah well, I kinda solved it by reinserting my SIM like a thousand times, and it eventually stayed connected to my carrier but I could only send texts and receive them as well. I couldn't make calls and people couldn't call me, if they tried, my "Leave a message" tone would appear immediately like the phone were turned off.

However, if I inserted a different SIM from another carrier, it worked perfectly! There wasn't any "No Service" error or anything, and it could make a connection to 3G and anything else, and it could make calls as well.

Of course, this SIM was burrowed from another iPhone 4, not a 4S and I just inserted my SIM into that phone to see if it worked, and it did? Strangely... I could make calls and anything!

This iPhone 4S which I own was bought used and it was made in December and is pretty new, but I got a copy of the warranty and sent it to be repaired at the original carrier, and if it does make any differences, I'll let you know.

I wonder if it is carrier sim related.  Maybe there is an issue with some iphone 4S with a certin type of sim.  I have AT&T have some signal issues but not as bad as everyone else here.  Maybe talk to the carrier about how if you swap the sims both phones work but if you put them back only the iphone 4 works.  They might have a different model sim card to try in it.

Just got off the phone with Apple. They now say that if a new SIM does not fix the problem, Apple will replace the phone. I think they are admitting a problem with the funky SIM tray.

So now I've installed a brand new SIM, and, of course, the problem has not yet happened. I think I'll give it a day.

may i ask with whom, or what department you were able to reach at apple?

I have an iPhone 4 and it has suddenly developed this 'No Service' and 'Searching' problem after faultless months of use. Considerable research shows that Apple has released an update for the iPhone 4S to, supposedly, address this problem (along with several others!) - the software is 5.0.1 (9A406). [Check your version by going in to 'Settings'; 'General'; 'About'; and look for 'Version']. My version on the iPhone 4 is 5.0.1 (9A405) so no update seems to be available as yet. Apple don't seem to have appreciated that it affects the iPhone 4 as well?

At the moment my iPhone is a glorified filofax - can do everything except phone calls and texts! If Apple can't sort this out soon then I think I'm going to follow a lot of advice I've been given and consider moving to Android. Sorry, Apple, I love the iPhone but it's useless to me if I can't use it as a phone (it's in the product name after all!)

If your phone is still under warranty, just call iphone tech support, or schedule a call back.

Update: "no service" problem started happening again within a few hours of trying a new SIM, so off to the Apple store for a new phone. So far so good with the new phone (but it's only been a few hours). I like the iCloud backup/restore very much. Seems to be a developing consensus that a certain percentage of the phones have a problem with the SIM card tray.

After 9A406 fixed the invalid sim message on my 4S I would sometimes completely loose the signal and it would show searching message. After some time the signal would reappear... Yesterday I turned off the diagnostics and usage to be automatically sent to Apple and the signal is constant now and did not have a problem ever since... Will do more testing and report here.

I agree... everyone ensure that you turn off the "Diagnostics and Usage' report that automatically gets sent to Apple... this should help you out.

Spread the word out...  turn this feature off as it is the culprit!

Apple will have to figure things out on it's own without this data since it is affecting our iPhones!

In my country there isn't any official Apple Technical service. That's why i went to an unoffical one. i told them what my problem is (every 30 or 40 minutes service is going away and says "no service" but after appr. 30 seconds service comes back again intermittenly). They told me "if i understood you correctly it is an antenna problem".

can it be true? i am really wanna know what is going?

Ps: if we write like this, we will know eachother what kind of problems we have. Unfortunately, we will not know the main problem from apple?

Apple say something to us....

I had this problem for a while. I logged a incident with Apple and after trying a few things over the phone, network resets upgrade to 9A406 etc. They eventually replaced the phone under warranty without me asking or demanding!!

Hence i think its a problem they are well aware of. The new phone has been fine so far but only had it since Tuesday so time will tell!!

hello eveybody. i have the iphone 4s since almost 3 months and since day 1 problems started, losing network, no service, sim failure and battery draining. and since day 1 i was trying to find a fix. after contacting may carrier they told me that it is a software-hardware incompatibilty between the 4s ios and the sim card and the network signal frequency of the carrier company. and i had to wait untill the new sim cards are produced. Meanwhile i was using another carrier company sim cards and my iphone worked much better. after that apple released ios 5.0.1 (9A406) so i returned back to my old carrier sim card and it worked good but some problems remained. 3 weaks ago my carrier company delivered the new sim cards although my phone was working fine. but for curiosity purpose, i tried to install ios 5.0.1 (9A405) again using the new delivered sim card, and no problems showed and i was able to call and text anytime. so i discovered that the no service and the no sim errors are generated due to sim-ios incompatibilty. but the battery draining and the latency in recovering the network after moving from a low coverage area to a good coverage area remained, and everytime i went into the elevator, underground, or any place with low coverage area, i lose the network and no service appeared "wich is normal" but if i go back to a high coverage area, the no service message remained for almost 10 minutes minimum "wich is completely not normal". more investigation about this problem and contacting apple bug reporting service and lots of trials, i discovered that this case is the main issue and it is behind the battery draining. Simply it was the diagnostic and usage reporting. whenever u enter a low coverage area, your phone loses network, causing an error generation, so your iphone tries to send this error message to apple server while you are without connection, it tries again and again and again without success, so the os shuts down the process of sending the error report and the network reception shuts down " you can simply monitor the procedure by installing the configuration utility from apple website " and monitor the configuration log where you can see the process happening untill shutting down the carrier reception retrievel function. so the solution and only solution was to turn off the diagnostic and usage sendind data automaticly. and after doing that, battery and no service error completely fixed.

SO TRUST ME THIS IS THE SOLUTION AND FOR BEST RESULTS

- ORDER LATEST SIM MODEL FROM UR CARRIER

- INSTALL IOS 5.0.1 (9A406)

- REMOVE SIM PIN

- TURN OFF DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE AUTOMATIC SEND

- USE YOU PHONE UNTILL BATTERY DRAINS AND SHUT DOWN THEN RECHARGE TO 100% "to refresh it and calibrate it"

Wish u good luck and let me know your feedbacks.

I was thinking it had something to do with the sim all along, but seamed that it followed the phone and not the sim.  My issues is no where near as bad, and I know I have the Automaticly send Diagnostic and Usage off on mine, that my be why it is not as bad on my iPhone 4s.  I wanted to swap out my sim anyways to elimate that as a possibility.  Mine is having trouble connecting to the network when powering on, after that it works perfect, it just takes about 5 minutes to connect before I can use my phone.

I was woundering exactly how you get the IOS 5.0.1 (9A406) update, currently I am running ISO 5.0.1 (9A405) and there are no update available for it, or at least that is what it says.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4148