Dear all,
I apologize for the delay in the investigation, I can guarantee that we are working hard to find the root cause of this issue.
As a matter of transparency, I can explain some of the causes behind the time needed to properly fix the issue:
- Systematically reproducing the issue is necessary for both root cause identification and reliability testing and, in this specific case, everything is complicated by the geographical nature of the bug, which only appears on a specific band combination and in specific areas; we have a partnership with a testing team in Germany, but they still need to travel to a test site every time we need a test run, making everything slower.
We are trying to speed up the testing process by using, in parallel, a simulated network in a partners’ lab, but due to the Christmas holidays, they cannot be as efficient as they normally are (see point #3). - Fairphone does not own the entirety of the source code; in fact, it is only partially visible to us and/or to our OEM; this means that also changes in binaries (of which the modem makes large use of) are not visible, so we need to coordinate with the third-parties that deliver the binaries to properly assess where the issue might have appeared. Once again, this results in slowing down the investigation, unfortunately.
- Christmas & New Year’s holidays have an impact on both Fairphone’s and our partners’ capacity.
Do not take the above as excuses, but rather simply a picture of the current situation.
We have received already a first potential fix, but it is still being tested so I cannot guarantee at this stage that it will solve the issue.
As soon as we have a viable and reliable solution, we will issue an extraordinary software update for those affected, of course.
Once again, I apologize for the inconvenience caused by the fault, I can only promise you that we are doing our best to solve it as soon as possible.
PS: the December SPL software update (TT40.A.131) was built before we were aware of the above-mentioned issue, just for clarity.