iOS™, iPhone™ and iPad™

[mickyg]

My iPhone 4S, which has been working beautifully for months, recently switched to "SOS Only" when we travelled out of primary, Vodafone coverage.  We should be in a Telstra 3G coverage area, and it should be working on my phone and show roaming.

I realised I hadn't specifically requested national roaming so put a call into customer service last night.  They activated national roaming but the phone still showed the same message (SOS Only).  Even after multiple reboots of the phone.

I made another call this morning to customer service (from my partner's 3 service on an iPhone 4) and the rep immediately jumped to the conclusion that the SIM's faulty and needs to be replaced.  Too bad I'm away for more than a week and there's no Vodafone store within hours of where we are!

Is there any sort of fix we can try while away from "civilisation" or am I stuck with a brick for the next week?

[Caitlin]

Hi mickyg,

I would like to assist you with this. What is the area or state your are currently in? National roaming for Vodafone customers is only available in regional areas of Victoria and Tasmania. 

If you are in Victoria or Tasmania, I recommend taking a look at our Coverage Map to ensure you are in a roaming location. Data services will not be available while roaming. You can also view more about our national roaming here.

Thanks,

Cait

[mickyg]

Hi Cait,

I'm in the Mansfield area, in Victoria.  I've checked the map, prior to our holiday, to make sure we had adequate coverage.  The only thing we didn't do was make sure we'd activated national roaming.  Mansfield has Vodafone coverage, and the 2 times we've been there over the last few days, service has returned.  In fact, I'd considered the possibility that enabling national roaming actually required the service to be in normal coverage for it to take effect.  However, rebooting the phone while in Vodafone coverage area did not help.

I've now made 3 calls to support.  Each rep has suggested something different.  The last one was the most helpful, suggesting we do a network reset and assuring me that if we had access to Telstra coverage, that Vodafone would roam. 

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[Nick]

Hey mickyg,

The national roaming that Cait mentioned is only applicable in limited areas of regional Victoria and Tasmania, and these areas are generally limited to a couple of major national highways. The Mansfield area is not one of these roaming zones.

I'd suggest that switching your phone to 2G-only whilst in Mansfield would help you access the network. The problem being that, on the iPhone 4S, this is not possible. What phone is your wife using? Is it locked to the 3 network? If it's not locked, are you able to pop your SIM in to her phone and switch it to 2G only to see if this helps?

If it is locked, you can unlock it from the Unlocking Page on the website. As you've got an iPhone 4S, you've probably recently upgraded, so you might be able to use your old phone to test the signal on 2G-only instead.

Please let me know how you go.

Cheers,

Nick

[lawstudent18]

the most recent post here is correct, the roaming is only for very limited areas. I went to Tassie to visit my family, knowing the Vodafone coverage is abysmal in rural areas (understandably but still abysmal) I turned national roaming on before going, it took me ages on the phone and about 4 sales reps before realising that the roaming is only for very small areas, mostly regional highways.

This really should be clearer on the VF website

[mickyg]

Yes, agreed.  I've been to the vodafone shop here, now that my holiday is finished and I'm home.  The rep there told me there is no vodafone roaming at all.  What?

Seriously, I've had 3 different responses in about 5 calls/visits to vodafone!  One rep on the phone said, "vodafone has no roaming coverage" whilst another said, "of course you can roam - if there's a Telstra signal, the phone will be able to use that, provided national roaming is enabled" whilst this latest one said again, "vodafone doesn't offer ANY roaming."  This is ridiculous and makes me think the reps in question need further training on their own products!

I am willing to try putting the sim into the other phone (the iPhone 4 is the other phone) and see if it works on 2g.

Are you saying the 4S doesn't do 2G?  That would actually explain a whole lot!

Also, the rep today sent a request to unlock my phone.  I then received a text message saying the phone was not in the database as a locked phone.  What!!!?

[mickyg]

By the way, where I live is a 3G area for Vodafone, 3 and Telstra.  So testing the 2G solution is not going to work as I don't have access to a 2G network for testing.

Wouldn't manually selecting Telstra from the list of available networks on the phone, allow us to test if selecting another carrier is going to work?  Just a thought I had to check if other carriers were even selectable and something I did heaps while we were away, with the result being a message about not being able to select these other carriers (we had Telstra and Optus as an option up in Mansfield).

By the way, Mansfield actually worked just fine for Vodafone, it was when we were outside of Mansfield that it went to "SOS only."  And also, the coverage map is insanely difficult to understand.  Where we were staying (Howqua) it showed there was coverage.  It didn't state it was only for other providers and as far as I could tell, it was Vodafone coverage, with a reduced signal strength.  It might be that it was stating these areas were 2G only.  I was not aware the 4S was not 2G capable.  As stated before, if that's the case, it would not have mattered what other network was available, if it was 2G, it wouldn't have worked.  Though that begs the question: why show another network on the list of available networks (on the 4S menu), if the phone can't talk to it?

[mickyg]

Yet another update.

After doing some checking, it seems the 4S will certainly work on 2G networks (as evidenced by the "E" I occasionally see next to the signal strength meter on the phone).  So you must have meant "forcing" 2G is not possible on the 4S.  This makes sense from a testing perspective.

So I'm back to the original dilemma but can ignore the "4S doesn't work with 2G" statement I made earlier.

[lawstudent18]

yea you cant force the 4s to go with 2G only.
but it is still 2G capable 

[Bruno]

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mickyg wrote:

Yes, agreed.  I've been to the vodafone shop here, now that my holiday is finished and I'm home.  The rep there told me there is no vodafone roaming at all.  What?

Seriously, I've had 3 different responses in about 5 calls/visits to vodafone!  One rep on the phone said, "vodafone has no roaming coverage" whilst another said, "of course you can roam - if there's a Telstra signal, the phone will be able to use that, provided national roaming is enabled" whilst this latest one said again, "vodafone doesn't offer ANY roaming."  This is ridiculous and makes me think the reps in question need further training on their own products!

I am willing to try putting the sim into the other phone (the iPhone 4 is the other phone) and see if it works on 2g.

Are you saying the 4S doesn't do 2G?  That would actually explain a whole lot!

Also, the rep today sent a request to unlock my phone.  I then received a text message saying the phone was not in the database as a locked phone.  What!!!?

---

Hi mickyg,

I'm sorry that you've had a poor experience trying to get some pretty straightforward answers to your questions.

What Nick has said in his post is correct. National Roaming is only available in very limited areas of Victoria and Tasmania as indicated on the coverage maps here.

Outside of National Roaming areas, Vodafone does not roam on any other networks.

In regards to your unlocking notification when trying to unlock your handset via our unlocking tool. If you fill in the handset unlocking difficulties webform on the site, a request will be sent to our Unlocking Team who will then confirm your IMEI and have it added to our database for unlocking.

You can get all the information you need to know about unlocking here.

Cheers,

-Bruno.