Try This… When Your Phone Won’t Text
By Malcolm Owen | No CommentsLeave a Comment
Posted: Monday, April 20, 2009 at 10:57 pm

Every once in a while, your mobile phone may stop making and receiving calls and texts. This happens to be the most common technical issue with handsets where I work, and stems from the fact that the phone simply stops updating on the phone network. Most handsets do this every few hours and can miss out on updates for a long time before it starts to affect the service. Effectively, the network eventually believes that the handset is not contactable, and therefore the problems start.

Sorting this out is pretty simple, so in an effort to save you money and aggravation on support calls (and to give me fewer repeat calls to deal with), here’s a short list of things before resorting to shouting down another phone.

Phone Kickstart
Turn off your phone, remove the back cover and remove the battery. Carefully, take the sim card out (It may come out easily, or it may be in some sort of mechanism, so if in doubt try and check your phone manual on how to do this). Put the battery back in WITHOUT the sim card, and turn it back on. The phone should complain about there not being a sim available. Don’t worry about this. After it’s been on and recognised the fact there’s no sim, turn it off again, put the sim back in (it might be a good idea to check that all of the contacts inside the phone and on the sim are clean and are touching each other properly) and put the battery in afterwards. Turn it on and see if you can call or text.

Manual Roam
If the above fails, go into the network settings and look for something that resembles Network Selection (your manual will help here again). It will probably be set to Automatic. Set it to Manual, and it will start scanning for what network carriers it can pick up. When the list appears, select any network but NOT the one you currently use. It’ll try and connect to that network, but it will probably fail. Even if it succeeds, change it back to your home network and set network selection back to Automatic.
Test again to see if it can call and text.

Sim Kickstart
If THAT fails, try and get hold of another handset from a friend that will accept sims from the home network that you use. Put the sim into that handset temporarily, turn it on, and then after it’s detected the network, turn it off and put the sim back into your own handset. Yet again test to see if it’s working now.

If it still fails, then feel free to call the network to see what it could be. It may well still be your handset, or it could be something network related that is outside of your control.