Another Bionic that can't get a data connection... no 4G/3G/1X signal.. only wifi...

[Claudia]

I'm also very frustrated with my Bionic. I was so excited to get it, I even gave up my upgrade to my husband so that I could wait until "this" was released.
I was on the OG Droid for two years, and although it was getting slow, I never had Data problems. It was always dependable. NOT the Bionic. If I set it down or leave it in my pocket for long periods of time, like 30 min, when I check on it I have no Data or wifi. Absolubtely clear. Turning on the screen "wakes" it, then it goes back to wifi or struggles to get back on 3G or 4G. Many times I'm out of luck and it won't connect to Data.
Oh, man, the dreams I had for this phone. Then, after all that wait, we're slapped on the face by Verizon/Motorola as they release the even "nicer" Razr, almost right away.

ok, Yes it is a faster phone than the OG Droid, but only when there's Data! I miss the dependability of my OG... :frown:

 

[Disneyman]

I am still having the same issues. Is there going to be some sort of fix.
i
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[CDMAengineer]

I reported it to MOT and they are aware of it. But what I am finding is that Verizon is at least 50% part of the problem. they are bouncing the basestation about every 15 mins in my area. In the time since I posted, they have had 5 NATIONWIDE outages, 3 of these for total oss of backhaul, including yesterday when they took down the entire San Diego area, then refused to honor my data plan on 3G, which I had running. I spent an hour and a half with tech level 3 support trying to get things to work.

Bottom line is the Bionic is only a tiny part of it, but VZ is a major part of this.

funny, as you sent the message, I tried to make a call on my phone and got "Emergency calls only" when my phone showed a 4G signal...so not just hte data link, but even affects voice calls.

something is REALLY wrong. Tthey are doing very little to make this a stable system. I would rather they just dump 4G out of the roaming plan until such time as they get done playing with their toys. then when it is stable, then FORCE me to 4G only, like they are doing now.

they are counting on all us lemmings to use Wifi as our backup and ignore that they are NOT delivering the service we pay for. I pay $60 a month for my data plan PLUS I pay $50 a month for my ISP and wifi. but I get more service from my ISP than I do with my 4G.

BTW - this last week they also crashed my Pantech USB modem on 4G. told me it was my Sim card.....

come on, I design this stuff.....you at least gotta come up with a better Bs story that that...

 

[CDMAengineer]

BTW - I htink that Verizon is fast approaching a class action lawsuit issue. I suggest complaints be filed with the FCC, not anyone else, as nobody else governs them but the FCC. and good luck with that one....

 

[tenacious bee]

The voice of reason often goes ignored. My son lives pretty much on a 4g/3g border and has had zero problems. Verizon has an extensive network here in Western PA.

TMy other son works in a VZW store and reports no more complaints pertaining to the bionic than any other phone that they sell. The above post is the logical explanation It flat out has to be local network configuration.

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[CDMAengineer]

Just got off a 45 minute call with Verizon tech suport and they are having problems today. Not local and not isolated. Nationwide yesterday, and this is hte 5th time since June.

unless your son has a specturm analyzer, 25 years on building handsets, the actual handset parmeters at hand, I doubt he has any idea of what is really going on. Even Verizon employees had no idea until I got to level 3 (yea, there is a level 3) and we debugged it. the network is bad...sorry to burst your bubble...

There are also draw backs to 3G on a 4G phone. the data time outs are set for an assumption that 3G and 4G have a certain speed. Like voice recognition or panorama pictures. they time out on a slow network. So even if you get a 3G conneciton like yesteday when the entire nation was out on 4G, the 3G got so overloaded that the operaitons timed out. this is an un-expected side trouble that the phone designers did not expect. It is real. It is not about having a reliable connection, but a data profile that assumes timeout parameters based on a certain speed of the network. Yesterday while I was on a level 3 call and asking hte teh to redo my profiles, the 3G network was so overloaded that it went to the default 384kBps data speed and caused alot of hte bionic data structures to time out.

I just hope that VZ stops using this as an experiment and starts treating customers wiht the respect they deserve. and I am not talking about your son here, as I suspect he is a hard workng front line guy in a retail store. No problem with them, but they do not get to talk to the engineering side much. the people in the stores are not the front line technical people like they have in Walnut Creek or richardson. they are many many levels down the chain and well out of the technical loop.

Take care.

 

[tenacious bee]

Maybe I didn't type that well. The son with the bionic does not work for Verizon his brother does. He has had zero problems including the "national' data outage . There is no "bubble" to burst.
My son that does work for Verizon says that the bionic has the same complaint ratio as every other android phone they offer. This is central and western pa. Anyone in those areas having this issue? If it is truly the phone itself why hasn't my son experienced any of these issues? Sorry that a lot of people are having problems but apparently a lot of people are not as well.

Anyhoo not looking to argue. Just reporting what I have experienced.

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[hockeygirl477]

I noticed my Bionic not connecting to 4G as well yesterday, and in some areas, not to 3G. I live in Las Vegas and was parked about 50 yards from a cell tower. Honestly, I don't use my phone for business, so having the internet is just a plus sometimes. Last night we were trying to find out which RedBox in our area had a particular movie. My BF has the T-Mobile HTC7 and guess what, he couldn't connect to the internet either. So instead of searching on our phones, we drove to the nearest Redbox. Not a huge issue. More of a convenience issue.

 

[CDMAengineer]

the problem with the network yesterday (well documented out there) is the IMS core went down and no data was going ANYWHERE, nationwide. there were a host of other issues while this was going on. Just too many to list, but there are alot of strange issues around the network that Verizon is hidng from alot of people and trying to make like we are all techni-idiots and incapable of finding out what is going on. I find it strange that your son did not have those problems, but then PA is right next to the ALU/Lucent main office and the cell sites around there may NOT be running the production code. Eastern PA around allentown and western NJ are all on Lucent experimental code alot of the time. these cell sites around san Diego are all ALU based.

Today, I found that two phones right next to each other (year I have two ideitical Driod Bionics...one corporate, one personal) and the corporate one stayed on 4G and worked, while hte personal one did not. Even to the point where the personal one would not let me make a phone call and said onloy 911 use, so I used hte corporate one to call *611 and figure out why. corporate one made the phone call just fine. Personal one did not. I saw this last night, so today I spent the day making sure that both phones were EXACTLY the same. down to the revisions of all chipsets, sim cards, PRL lists, software loads, applications, setups, etc. Tonight it happened again that the corporate phone failed while the consumer phone did not. and if I tunred on my wifi on the consumer phone, it then gave me really good connections to 4G (which is bypassed when you wifi, so they really did NOT connect me to 4G..)

The PRL list is not updating correctly on these phones either. for those of you less technical this is hte *228 that you used to type when they were 3G to update hte roaming list. With the 4g phones this is supposed to happen when you power up and it should update hte roaming list automatically. Well it is not. Happens only when it feels like it.

Like I said, there are like 20 things broken about this network. and to tenacious Bee, I have been a VZ customer for almost 20 years (way before Verizon existed...it was Pac bell Wireless) and I have seen so many network problems, but not one that is so well hidden as this series is. We have had 5 documented nationwide outages of the network on 4G since October 14th. I have logged like 50 minor (5-10 minue outages) in the network since otc 14th, when I started on this when VZ blatantly told me in the middle of the documented nationwide outage that everything was fine and that my phone was broken.

When I visited upstate NY with reletives this yeear, I got a 4G connection that went 100 Mbps or more...fastest I have seen. that is how 4G should work. all the time.

What I think is going on is that the pressure to get 4G out there so fast has caused Verizon to forego it's usual strenuous testing stanadards and that they are fighting to make it right. I have no problem with them ringing out the network at all, has to happen, but tell us that this is what is up, do nt make us pay extra for using 3G and 1X for data while they are playing with this, and do not setup our phones so that they fail when on anything but 4G. If Verizon does this, I am ok with the phone. If not, then they are taking oney on a false pretense and need to be repremanded by the FCC.

 

[wooddale]

the problem with the network yesterday (well documented out there) is the IMS core went down and no data was going ANYWHERE, nationwide. there were a host of other issues while this was going on. Just too many to list, but there are alot of strange issues around the network that Verizon is hidng from alot of people and trying to make like we are all techni-idiots and incapable of finding out what is going on. I find it strange that your son did not have those problems, but then PA is right next to the ALU/Lucent main office and the cell sites around there may NOT be running the production code. Eastern PA around allentown and western NJ are all on Lucent experimental code alot of the time. these cell sites around san Diego are all ALU based.

Today, I found that two phones right next to each other (year I have two ideitical Driod Bionics...one corporate, one personal) and the corporate one stayed on 4G and worked, while hte personal one did not. Even to the point where the personal one would not let me make a phone call and said onloy 911 use, so I used hte corporate one to call *611 and figure out why. corporate one made the phone call just fine. Personal one did not. I saw this last night, so today I spent the day making sure that both phones were EXACTLY the same. down to the revisions of all chipsets, sim cards, PRL lists, software loads, applications, setups, etc. Tonight it happened again that the corporate phone failed while the consumer phone did not. and if I tunred on my wifi on the consumer phone, it then gave me really good connections to 4G (which is bypassed when you wifi, so they really did NOT connect me to 4G..)

The PRL list is not updating correctly on these phones either. for those of you less technical this is hte *228 that you used to type when they were 3G to update hte roaming list. With the 4g phones this is supposed to happen when you power up and it should update hte roaming list automatically. Well it is not. Happens only when it feels like it.

Like I said, there are like 20 things broken about this network. and to tenacious Bee, I have been a VZ customer for almost 20 years (way before Verizon existed...it was Pac bell Wireless) and I have seen so many network problems, but not one that is so well hidden as this series is. We have had 5 documented nationwide outages of the network on 4G since October 14th. I have logged like 50 minor (5-10 minue outages) in the network since otc 14th, when I started on this when VZ blatantly told me in the middle of the documented nationwide outage that everything was fine and that my phone was broken.

When I visited upstate NY with reletives this yeear, I got a 4G connection that went 100 Mbps or more...fastest I have seen. that is how 4G should work. all the time.

What I think is going on is that the pressure to get 4G out there so fast has caused Verizon to forego it's usual strenuous testing stanadards and that they are fighting to make it right. I have no problem with them ringing out the network at all, has to happen, but tell us that this is what is up, do nt make us pay extra for using 3G and 1X for data while they are playing with this, and do not setup our phones so that they fail when on anything but 4G. If Verizon does this, I am ok with the phone. If not, then they are taking oney on a false pretense and need to be repremanded by the FCC.

I dont know a whole lot about whats going but I had a feeling it was both Verizon and Motos fault. I filled a complaint with the BBB and the FCC. If there is any thing I can do to help you in your Quest let me know Im in

 

[CDMAengineer]

thanks. this is a full time consulting gig for me, so I will keep going.

On my post above, I meant to say that tonight the personal phone did NOT work, the corporate phone DID work.. In all cases I am seeing a far better level of service completion with a corporate phone than with just a personal phone.

Take care.

 

[xXJakeXx]

with the people that have filed a complaint, did you have to let Verizon know of it before they started refunding you or did they contact you by themselves? Have they given anyone trouble since they have? Thanks for Amy input, happy new year! My gf had had similar problems with her tb but they only refunded her 2 dollars and i'm Pissed off because that isn't right and she should be refunded the full thirty. Should I have her file a complaint as well? Ty

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[wooddale]

with the people that have filed a complaint, did you have to let Verizon know of it before they started refunding you or did they contact you by themselves? Have they given anyone trouble since they have? Thanks for Amy input, happy new year! My gf had had similar problems with her tb but they only refunded her 2 dollars and i'm Pissed off because that isn't right and she should be refunded the full thirty. Should I have her file a complaint as well? Ty

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I filled complaints with the BBB and the FCC I would guess they will take action when the BBB or The FCC contact them and they will contact them

 

[RETUSAFNCO]

I had the same problem and VZW said to remove the battery and sim card while the phone is on, wait 30 seconds, install battery and sim card then reboot. I have had continuous 4g for approximately 24 hours.

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[CDMAengineer]

what they had you do is to reset the system authentication in two steps. One by taking hte battery out, it makes the phone force full registration on the system again. This will fix the fact that the 4G basestation forgot your current registration. system bug number one...

Second one is exactly what I reported yesterday. by taking hte SIM card out, it makes the sim card register that it must be reverified. what this does is force a redownload of the PRL list ot the sim card in 4G. PRL is the preferred roaming lists. Or what they used to have you do was *228 in 3G. This list is what allows your phone to see a new basestation or ignore an out of service basestation. So if they took that particular bts out of service then having you re-register the PRL list means that they can get you to de-authorize the bad BTS rather than them do the right thing.

Nice to see that at least Verizon is finding ways to over come thier faults. but it shpows me they still do not have a real fix for this.