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no 4g
- Thread starter mosko
- Start date
if your phone supports 4g than it should be able to pick up 4g signals.....now this is provided that you have 4g in your area. check with your carrier for coverage.
i would seriously look into getting a new phone. this phone is 7 years old. and only upgradeable to android 7.1 (nougat)! you will not really do much of anything.
i would seriously look into getting a new phone. this phone is 7 years old. and only upgradeable to android 7.1 (nougat)! you will not really do much of anything.
So I guess that you've never had a 4G connection from this phone, and now that Vodafone have turned-off their 3G you don't have a data connection (or maybe just a 2G one, which is barely better than no connection).
The thing that confuses me is that you say that your phone says 4G is available. Does it really? Or does it just say that the Vodafone network is available? A phone can show the list of available networks, and will tell you what types of connection it can use, but I've never met one that will tell you what connection types are available from which networks. The only way to find that out is to connect to the network and see what you get (e.g. if you only get 2G that means that your phone couldn't find a 4G signal from that network).
The one exception is if you have a really old contract that didn't include 4G data. I doubt anyone has sold one of those for more than a decade, so your contract or SIM would have to be much older than the phone, which sounds very unlikely. But since that handset supports 5 of Vodafone's 7 UK LTE bands, and was actually manufactured for and sold by Vodafone, it's not going to be that Vodafone don't support it for 4G. If you only have the problem in some locations then they might just be coverage holes, but if you never get a 4G connection I'd speak to Vodafone and see whether they can explain it.
The thing that confuses me is that you say that your phone says 4G is available. Does it really? Or does it just say that the Vodafone network is available? A phone can show the list of available networks, and will tell you what types of connection it can use, but I've never met one that will tell you what connection types are available from which networks. The only way to find that out is to connect to the network and see what you get (e.g. if you only get 2G that means that your phone couldn't find a 4G signal from that network).
The one exception is if you have a really old contract that didn't include 4G data. I doubt anyone has sold one of those for more than a decade, so your contract or SIM would have to be much older than the phone, which sounds very unlikely. But since that handset supports 5 of Vodafone's 7 UK LTE bands, and was actually manufactured for and sold by Vodafone, it's not going to be that Vodafone don't support it for 4G. If you only have the problem in some locations then they might just be coverage holes, but if you never get a 4G connection I'd speak to Vodafone and see whether they can explain it.
Ah, OK, that could be a problem.
"LTE" is the technical name for the standard used for 4G in most of the world. That is a data-only standard, it has no voice channel (unlike 2G and 3G). "VoLTE" is "Voice over LTE", which is a Voice over IP implementation (Voice over Internet Protocol) for 4G networks. Early 4G phones didn't support that: by 2017 most did, but this was a budget device so might have been using old components.
If the phone doesn't support VoLTE then you should be able to get a data connection but wouldn't be able to take or make voice calls without switching to 2G. In fact that's what old 4G phones did: they dropped the 4G connection and switched to 2G to make or receive phone calls. So it's not obvious to me why VoLTE should be required since Vodafone still have a 2G network, though obviously call quality would be worse and you couldn't use data while making a voice call. Conceivably they've made some other change which means they no longer support this, but since this used to work it's not a given that it would no longer do so.
However I would have expected them to warn you, either via a general communication to all customers or by contacting customers who were using incompatible phones (they know what handset you use because the phone identifies itself to the network when it connects, so they could easily send messages to anyone using a handset that wouldn't be fully compatible after the change). Technology does change: analogue TV broadcasts were turned-off, the original analogue mobile networks were shut down, UK landlines are switching to VoIP technology, and people didn't get a decade's warning about any of those things. VoLTE started rolling out in the UK in 2015, so I don't know whether you really can say it's unfair for a network to require it 9 years later (I'm more unimpressed with their launching a non-VoLTE handset in 2017 to be honest). But if you were going to lose service with the 3g switch-off they should have told you beforehands.
"LTE" is the technical name for the standard used for 4G in most of the world. That is a data-only standard, it has no voice channel (unlike 2G and 3G). "VoLTE" is "Voice over LTE", which is a Voice over IP implementation (Voice over Internet Protocol) for 4G networks. Early 4G phones didn't support that: by 2017 most did, but this was a budget device so might have been using old components.
If the phone doesn't support VoLTE then you should be able to get a data connection but wouldn't be able to take or make voice calls without switching to 2G. In fact that's what old 4G phones did: they dropped the 4G connection and switched to 2G to make or receive phone calls. So it's not obvious to me why VoLTE should be required since Vodafone still have a 2G network, though obviously call quality would be worse and you couldn't use data while making a voice call. Conceivably they've made some other change which means they no longer support this, but since this used to work it's not a given that it would no longer do so.
However I would have expected them to warn you, either via a general communication to all customers or by contacting customers who were using incompatible phones (they know what handset you use because the phone identifies itself to the network when it connects, so they could easily send messages to anyone using a handset that wouldn't be fully compatible after the change). Technology does change: analogue TV broadcasts were turned-off, the original analogue mobile networks were shut down, UK landlines are switching to VoIP technology, and people didn't get a decade's warning about any of those things. VoLTE started rolling out in the UK in 2015, so I don't know whether you really can say it's unfair for a network to require it 9 years later (I'm more unimpressed with their launching a non-VoLTE handset in 2017 to be honest). But if you were going to lose service with the 3g switch-off they should have told you beforehands.
they did inform that when 3g is switched off my phone will no longer work but my phone said it had 4g lte so i did not believe them lol
Yeah, they really needed to explain that one: the assumption that a 4G phone will continue to work is perfectly reasonable, and really only people who follow this stuff closely are likely to know why it might not be.