Odd cellphone problem?

F

FullerH

Joined
Nov 25, 1998
Messages
12,632
Yesterday, I had a problem with my VeriZon LG flip cellphone. It seemed to be working just fine except that I could not get in or out on it. I finally reached VeriZon's service and they did a remote shut down and then rebooted it and it worked. Since I had repeatedly tried this to no avail, I asked what else they had done. The woman said that my last phone call had not properly disconnected from the cell tower and that it was screwing up my connectivity. She had broken the connection along with the reboot. Have any of you ever heard of this sort of thing? Can anyone explain it to me?
 
Sometimes phones can be "fixed" just by removing the battery (and putting it back on again of course :)). Most cell phones have kind of crummy software and occasionally have a full or partial crash that is fixed with a reboot just like your computer. You would think they could make a cell phone free of problems by now, but they can't.
 
I already knew about the battery trick, and had tried it to no avail last night. That is one complete cold reboot when you do that, but it still hadn't broken that connection with the cell tower. VeriZon had to do that, apparently.
 
ok, it could be a few things, but most likely was Authentication failure. I have a question for you....do you have another phone around the house or office that may still have your phone number programmed in it? if you do and it is ever powered on, it will try to page the closest tower and set up a "registration" on the network, this tells the network you are now ready to make/receive calls and where to send your calls if any made to you. This is what any phone will normally do wheather active or not, now if the old phone does this it will look to the network like there are now two different ESN's (electronic serial number) out on the network transmitting your number and this will look like "cloning" or something fishy, and the switch will cause you authentication to fail and will not permit any outgoing/incoming calls. It's really just a safety feature to protect both you and Verizon Wireless from fraud. Sometimes a soft reboot works and the next outbound call automatically trigger an SSD update and sometimes they will need to fix your authentication manually with a manual SSD update. It's not a big deal unless it becomes something that happens often then that usually points to a problem with the phone itself.
 
I don't have another phone with that number. I got a new number when I got this phone as I was not happy with the old one; it had gotten on too many lists and was getting too many junk calls.
 
Do you thoroughly check your phone bill? If so are there any numbers on there you dont recognise? while its unlikey, its possible your phone could have been cloned...
 
MadDaddy, I changed it just short of two years ago and this is the first time that this has happened. I have had other problems with shutting the phone off when the battery is very low and that is when I have done the cold reboot by taking the battery out of the phone, but this is the first tie that this has happened.

Bladefixation, we check our bills quite regularly since we have trouble with our daughter, who is on our bill, going over her allotted free minutes and putting all of us into the per minute billing. We have had to have her phone cut off a couple of times in order to get her attention after her bills ran up to about $400-$500 per month last summer.
 
I just re-read your first post again, and it sounds like a "hung ciruit", once again no biggie, it is a cell site/trunk group/switch related thing that happens from time to time, you end the call but the trunk doesn't get released and it still looks like you are on the call, most likely it will never happen to you again. Just watch your next bill to make sure you don't have an odd call that is much longer than you would normally make, the billable minutes could may very well have kept ticking allong with that call. If it does show up just call customer service up and make them credit the call, they should be able to cross reference it to your last call in and the comments on your account.
 
Thanks, MadDadddy, that's pretty much what the woman at Verizon Customer Service said, but not so clearly and, of course, w/o the warning about the billable minutes. That had occurred to me and I have been checking. So far, I haven't seen any.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top