Problem with iPhone 4s searching for signal, than to full signal, and back again?

if you are searching, obviously 3g is on. 3g is not a setting that i know of. You can turn on your celluar service or not. That's your 3g. If its off, it won't search for anything.

Were you smoking marijuana while reading this post??? What network are you going to connect to that allows you to turn 3G off execpt wifi, but wifi doesnt search either.

leave the drugs alone man.

I meant "cellular data". (my bad, I just usually use the terms "3G" and "data" interchangeably)

So, it was just a very poor choice of words. Not smoking anything...

Sorry for the confusion.

I can't believe that so many people are having the same exact issue and this hasn't been solved.

I've gone through the exact frustrating experiences and I've tried the same solutions with the same results - "Searching". I'm stuck with a useless iPhone.

My term with AT&T is soon to expire, so I'm not planning on renewing and I'm not going to try a new iphone. I'm releaved actually. Maybe now I'll only work 10 hour days, leaving my email and entire workload at the office!

Thanks Apple! I'm actually happy at the thought!

I'm sorry to hear you're still having issues. For me, the problem was eventually fixed with one of the software updates. Maybe it's a physical problem with your phone, in which case I might suggest making a Genius Bar appointment at your nearest Apple store.

Best of luck and I hope you find a solution.

Which software update? Was it iOS 6?

There is not a fix in iOS 6! Never had this as an issue with my iPhone 4 - but my new iphone 5 over the weekend was often showing either no signal or is continually searching. Turning it into airplane mode and off again, it seems to find a signal instantly - so looks like a software issue. Today I've a signal 🙂

No, it was one of the iOS 5 updates that fixed it for me.

I took the phone to the Genius bar, they ran a diagnostic and said that everything looked great. They suggested I replace the sim card. I went to AT&T and they replaced the sim card, the phone worked for a few hours, then went back to the non-stop "Searching..." mode. I called AT&T and they had me swap sim cards with another iphone in my office and it proved my sim card was working fine in the other iphone, but my iphone didn't work with either sim card. I was so frustrated that I plugged the phone into the charger Friday night and left it there for the entire weekend. Out of habit I checcked it several times during the weekend and it was still "Searching..."

This morning it magically had 4 bars of signal and several voicemails from the weekend have come in. Does this sound like a hardware issue to anyone else or is it just me?

I had issues with my iphone 4s too when i first got it in january. I would always have no signal in places where there's always signal. i would have to restart my phone just to get it back which would only work for a couple of minutes. I'd always have to restart my phone when i wake up in the morning. I got my phone from another country and had to wait for my dad to come back and take it if i wanted to replace it since there is no such thing of doing so in my country. In March, when the iOS 5.1 came out, I decided to try out the update before I decided there was a defect in my phone. It worked. I didnt have a problem with the signal issue. I suppose u could try installing 5.1 before updating it to 6.