December Sec Update changed nothing. Still connection loss once you get into a 5g cell. Then erratic attempts to sign into the cell with immediate disconnect.
Soooo… maybe the January Update?
Communication from Fairphone is a real desaster, if they announce a fix with the next update but don’t tell which update they think of.
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Ok when i get the update and it is not fixed this was it for Fairphone for me. They patched something that worked into something that don’t work. Then the E-Mail of the the Fairphone support is right. There is no shedule when this fault is fixed. @anon1128606 can you say where the problem is? Why you don’t fix this problem?
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Installed the newest December patch but unfortunately it didn’t fix thr 5G Bug for me.
I understand your disappointment, but at least the update neither has changes that weren’t mentioned in the release notes, nor is there anything promised in the release notes that in the end isn’t in the update.
@anon1128606 mentioned that the faulty update was stopped for a specific German carrier (most probably Telekom). I wonder if anyone can confirm that for the A.127 or A.131 update. I’m on a different carrier, so I’m just following this from the grandstand.
If you are bought the phone for anything more than the pure phone you should probably give them somewhat more time. Even “unfair” companies can do much worse: I have a ticket at Spotify because they managed to destroy a functionality late this summer. They have never really confirmed the issue (difference No. 1), never confirmed that they are working on it (difference No. 2), gave no timeline at all, in summary their response was “keep your app updated and your fingers crossed”. The issue is still open and they ask for more money from next year on.
It’s holiday time currently and many people who didn’t spend their vacation days throughout the year took them in December, that might explain the unlucky situation with Fairphone currently.
Thank you for testing and confirming that the problem still exists. I had already set a deadline for today and will now cancel the contract. I am extremely disappointed with Fairphone. A miserable communication, not even an attempt at a solution. If I want to take care of my phone myself, I can continue to compile and programme Lineage OS.
What good is exchangeable hardware if the software doesn’t play along?
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I bought the phone because of the qualcomm chipset, which can use the 5G NSA Low Band and B3/n1 band combination. One, the important one B3/n1, i can’t use at the moment. If the December Update don’t fix it like the others said, i can’t use this for more than a month, that is to long. I was patient give the support all information that they asked for, even more for example a test cell location. I called the support at day one after the faulty patch and give them detailed information. Now my patience come to an end, and i want a answer why they don’t fix it as soon as possible.
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Because it takes time to solve the problem without making things worst for others?
Because people are on vacations at the time of the year ?
Because of something else ?
And so what ?
Ok that is the picture i have of Fairphone now. Thanks for this answer.
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Yes, treating employees fairly is one of the aspects of Fairphone. Having a monthly release cycle is challenging. Now we got a bad mistake introduced at a very bad time of the year. While everyone would have hoped to have a fix as soon as possible I could really imagine people being off with planned vacations. Fixing such an issue might require canceling vacations for some employees and having them work overtime while most other people sit under the Christmas tree, scroll on their phones and worry about the best radio access technology not being available.
We are all just speculating, but from my own experience in software development I know that tiny changes often have quite some dependencies and thus require quite some effort to be brought into a software release.
The communication however could have been better indeed…
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It is okay for me if this takes time.
I sometimes also have IT projects to manage. Test procedures, test controls, sandbox pre-test, all that little time-thieving going on.
And this is not Samsung with thousands of programmers. All okay for me. My 5g-contract costs 5 Euros extra per month, if i cannot afford that, i should have bought some Samsung Axx-Series.
I bought Fairphone for the FAIR, and for being able to repair it.
But sending an email to their german customers or at least give an official feedback in THE Fairphone forum… Well, is this such difficult?
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Are you living in Germany? I am asking since I do and up to now (1.1.2024), there is no possibility for me to download via OTA the “new” security patch directly from my smartphone. So I am wondering, if the German Telekom has already tested and checked the update as ok. Why should a country specific issue being solved if there is no official patch file available?
I am looking forward to getting your replies, if any.
Regards.
I live in Germany and use congstar / Telekom as provider. I got the Update (Dec Security Patch) on Dec 31 (i wrote 30th before, looked it up, sorry. Dec 31 is correct).
As far as i learned, the Updates are released in tranches to reduce server stress.
I took a daily look into the system settings to see if it is already there.
Depending on your own settings, updates may only be downloaded with WiFi connection. In that case, system will only download and report to you, if you got WiFi long enough to download.
You can reset your preferences or manually start the download - if update is avaulable for your tranche.
Hello @Andreas_B , thank you for the hints. Since I am using WIFI 80% of the day, I simply have to wait until my provider Deutsche Telekom has uploaded the fix. Literally, I can wait and live with LTE+ instead of 5G although I pay extra money for the “extra” speed if available. I most often don’t stream live 4k movies or series when I am Offroad in 5G data Neverland Bavaria.
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Maybe it is related to this post 5g Network not working with Telekom Germany after A.127 update - #9 by FrancescoSalvatore as it is blocked for Telekom but not for reseller like Congstar?!?
If blocked for Telekom only, Fairphone would be stupid.
Problem should occur for everyone using Telekom infrastructure. That includes subsidiaries like congstar as well as any unassociated reseller.
I cannot imagine the problem is related to Telekom as provider but not their technical infrastructure, so it would not make sense stopping the provider to distribute the update, but not the other users of the infrastructure.
If that happened i would ask myself… Well. Let us assume i would use inappropiate language.
Maybe it is simply a bad timing, but they know of this issue exactly from Dec 12th. So there was enough time before Christmas to look into it. They know exactly which frequency band and which provider causes the problem, so it should be possible to find the issue. You are right many people are in holiday, but why the Dec update could be integrated in this time but nobody can fix this problem? I give them time until end of Jan24, then i want to get my money back and switch to another brand. I lost very much trust in the updating process of Fairphone. After the big dissapointment with Gigaset before i think i go back to IPhone. I never had such software issues with my IPhone or CAT Phones before, and it is really sad that i now have software problems the second time within one year. Don’t get me wrong, until the faulty update, i was very happy with the phone. But at the moment this situation is only frustrating.
The latest update didn’t have any feature fixes included at all as far as I can see, “only” the security updates. I could imagine that for doing this you need someone who pulls in those changes, checks if anything is broken in a way that stuff won’t compile anymore, run a test bench, hopefully all tests pass and that’s it. For some real fixes you either need more time, the right expert not on vacations or alternatively a bunch of developers in high-talent low-cost areas without vacation days but the privilege to not have to go home at the end of the day…
Looking into what is part of the security updates I see components from Google, but also from Qualcomm, our chipset vendor. Let’s imagine they introduced the issue and Fairphone needs to work around that now, needs to get in touch with them or whatever. I doubt that the issue was introduced by a bored software developer and would just have to be reverted and that’s it.
Well, while I could imagine that it is somehow like what I speculated I would definitely like to know what it is really. But I can understand that a company needs to have at least a few secrets.
Call me naive, but in general I try to assume the good intent and people doing the best they can but without sacrificing their private life. But yes, talking about what they are doing would be helpful.
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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.
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Hi Francesco, thank you. That is an answer i can live with. I really hope that you find a fix soon. Please hold me/us up to date, if you have new informations.
@anon1128606 Hi, another week is over without 5G in the Deutsche Telekom Network. So let me kindly ask if there is any progression made to fix this annoying bug?
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