Could I have done something in settings?

Question

The AT&T logo at the top of my phone goes away but my bars for service remain at the top. Calls will go straight to my voice mail. I don't get missed calls nor will I get text messages until I turn airplane mode on then off, that seems to work. I have an Optimus G and I set it on the eco mode, could it be a setting issue that is causing my service to drop like that? It happened with my Iphone 3s too so it has to be my service. It's very annoying when someone is trying to call me and I'm getting really upset with it doing this. Please help. If no one can figure it out here I'm just going to take my phone to AT&T.

BrianHeston · Answer

I've had my LG Optimus G for about a week now, and mine just started doing the same thing today. I believe that AT&T has been messing around with the towers in my area pretty heavily lately so that may be part of the issue. I'm basing this belief on my use of the Llama app, which uses a history of which cell towers it sees, and lets the user to group them into specified areas (home, work, etc.), which the app can then use to toggle profiles and settings. Recently, the tower IDs for my home area have been changing quite frequently, and I've had to assign each of these new numbers to the "Home" area in order to get my profiles to change properly. So obviously something has been making changes to the network. But I'd like to know if this is a problem with these phones, or if it actually is network related.

I haven't messed with the settings enough to think there is an issue there (never touched Eco Mode or anything like that). I just replaced a Samsung Infuse 4G which was not having this problem at all. But like you said, toggling Airplane Mode resolved it both times that it happened to me today. Mine seems to have started acting up when I was in a location where the signal was very spotty. I go the impression that perhaps the phone just couldn't figure out how to lock back on to a good signal even once I left the area. Once I toggled Airplane Mode, it locked on just fine and stayed fine for several hours. Then it, seemingly at random, it did it again. Again, toggling Airplane Mode did the trick, and it has been fine ever since.

I also noticed that my battery life seems significantly lower today. I talked on the phone a little more than usual today, maybe an hour, versus typically not talking more than 10-15 minutes if at all. But I can't see that little amount of talk time eating roughly an additional 30% of my battery in the same time period. So I'm wondering if it's possible that while the phone was having trouble coming out of whatever state it was in without signal, it was perhaps chewing through more battery than normal as well.

Hopefully some other people will chime in here and we can get to the bottom of this.