Hi everyone,
this is just a PSA for anyone who may be getting no cell reception on their iPhone. My dad's iPhone 11 one day suddenly just stopped getting cell signal, so we thought it was a temporary issue on the carrier side. When there was no change, I started doing the usual steps - Airplane mode, restart phone, reset network settings, contact carrier again. When none of this helped, I backed it up and did a factory reset. After the phone was wiped, I could not get through the activation screen, as every time I tried to activate it, it would show an error saying activation had failed, most often it was "Server temporarily unavailable".
Contacted Apple, explained everything, and while waiting for a response, took it to a third party repair shop with excellent reviews. They said it was the motherboard, 140 euros to fix it, saying the phone "had lost its IMEI", meaning it was a hardware failure on the motherboard and the phone was no longer able to send the IMEI info to Apple in the activation process, so no activation and phone was useless. I decided not to do the repair and waited to hear back from Apple. They told me to bring the phone in, did that immediately and got the same reply - motherboard, but now Apple's "fix" is to buy a new phone lol as they don't do repairs.
Since the phone was out of warranty, it turned into a paperweight with me wiping it back to factory settings.
Given that I had read a lot of posts online with people saying this issue was fixed for them with a factory reset, the PSA part is:
- before taking the last step and wiping the phone, take it to a repair shop for them to check if it's the motherboard. If it's an older phone and you don't want to put money into it after several years of use, you may be better off continuing to use it as a streaming device or whatever and just make peace with the fact it no longer has cell reception. Everything on my dad's phone worked fine other than the lack of cell signal - screen, battery, wifi, all good. It could have continued to be used for other things, but I didn't know I would effectively brick the phone by restoring to factory settings.
this is just a PSA for anyone who may be getting no cell reception on their iPhone. My dad's iPhone 11 one day suddenly just stopped getting cell signal, so we thought it was a temporary issue on the carrier side. When there was no change, I started doing the usual steps - Airplane mode, restart phone, reset network settings, contact carrier again. When none of this helped, I backed it up and did a factory reset. After the phone was wiped, I could not get through the activation screen, as every time I tried to activate it, it would show an error saying activation had failed, most often it was "Server temporarily unavailable".
Contacted Apple, explained everything, and while waiting for a response, took it to a third party repair shop with excellent reviews. They said it was the motherboard, 140 euros to fix it, saying the phone "had lost its IMEI", meaning it was a hardware failure on the motherboard and the phone was no longer able to send the IMEI info to Apple in the activation process, so no activation and phone was useless. I decided not to do the repair and waited to hear back from Apple. They told me to bring the phone in, did that immediately and got the same reply - motherboard, but now Apple's "fix" is to buy a new phone lol as they don't do repairs.
Since the phone was out of warranty, it turned into a paperweight with me wiping it back to factory settings.
Given that I had read a lot of posts online with people saying this issue was fixed for them with a factory reset, the PSA part is:
- before taking the last step and wiping the phone, take it to a repair shop for them to check if it's the motherboard. If it's an older phone and you don't want to put money into it after several years of use, you may be better off continuing to use it as a streaming device or whatever and just make peace with the fact it no longer has cell reception. Everything on my dad's phone worked fine other than the lack of cell signal - screen, battery, wifi, all good. It could have continued to be used for other things, but I didn't know I would effectively brick the phone by restoring to factory settings.
