...Losing 3G on my iPhone4

(Photo courtesy: www.apple.com)

September 26, 2011

2 Sundays ago, I was at Sacred Heart School Cebu for the Hotel, Resorts & Restaurants Association of Cebu Inc. sportsfest. Since I was going to see a lot of old friends and my husband was having their volleyball championship game, I had wanted to be able to tweet real time and post photos ASAP. However, after registering to Powersurf, my iPhone4 did not display the "3G" icon nor the "e" for edge icon.

I have been used to Globe constantly losing signal or having 'maintenance work' almost all the time that I dismissed it as that. I still kept checking the whole day though. But nothing.

Fast forward to yesterday, my kids and I were watching Disney Live! and I wanted to post photos on my insta.gram but again after I registered to Powersurf, nothing.

After the show, I went to the Globe Business Center at the Active Zone of Ayala Center, Cebu to ask for help. They were the ones who configured the settings on my phone when I purchased my Globe micro-sim since I was a Smart user and I just shifted to Globe because of its 3G service.

Unfortunately, the only person in the slowest express counter was this guy. I was not able to get his name but he was the only person manning the counter at around 3:30pm. He asked me if the phone was jailbroken. I said yes. And immediately he said, he cannot do anything about it. He said that once the iPhone is jailbroken, there are tendencies that it can no longer get 3G signal. He only checked the settings of my phone and that's it. I was dismissed. I asked him again if there was really nothing he could do about it, and he said again that there was none. He said that if the phone was not jailbroken, he could have restored the factory settings and that would bring back 3G signal. But for the jailbroken phone, sorry, there's never gonna be 3G for that.

I was dismayed and then I remembered to tweet @TALK2GLOBE on Twitter and they gave me this advice:

@uronlysunshine Hi! My apology for your experience. May I know your exact location (w/ brgy. name), date & time of experience, error prompt (if any), & your mobile number for further checking. Btw, have your tried Soft Reset on the iPhone? Just simply press and hold the Home button and at the same time press and hold the Sleep button. Or Hard Reset. You can completely power the iPhone down by doing a Hard Reset. Press and hold the Home button and the Sleep button at the same time for at least ten seconds, until the Apple logo appears. None of your apps or settings will be lost. This is a good way to conserve power and also to completely reset the iPhone. This might be necessary if a buggy app crashes. Or you may also try both.Let me know if there's any changes. Kindly reply via DM. Thanks!

I tried Hard Reset first and that did it right away. Now, I don't understand why that utterly clueless Globe guy did not do that. Globe got bad-mouthed because of him. And yes, I filed a complaint.

Kudos to @TALK2GLOBE for the fast and effective reply!

I am posting this so that the next time something like this happens, I'd remember what to do and to help others who might have encountered the same problem and the same 'helpful' Globe guy in Ayala Center Cebu.