Fails to register in network

[Johannes_Rohr]

I am currently on a visit to North Dakota, USA, and for some reason, the Fairphone fails to not only to register to any mobile network but even to find any, using the manual search. When I run manual search it only returns “Fehler bei der Netzwersuche” (“error during search for networks”) and shows zero results. I have tried to get more details via adb, but in the log I didn’t find messages related to phone registration. I saw the message “E/FWKEXT ( 531): Enter GetCurrentOP” repeated many times, and I have been unable to find out via google what it means.
It still seemed to work ok yesterday when I landed in Denver, the phone registered itself ok, I got several SMS from my network provider, then, while I was in the queue, the phone hand itself up and I had to reboot, for which it took unusually long. I do not know whether it still was able to register itself at that point, because I didn’t attempt to make any phone calls, but the next day in Bismarck, North Dakota, I saw that I couldn’t receive any SMS and I tried to get the phone to register manually, but failed.

And the problem has persisted since. Everybody around has their cellphones working just fine, only I don’t. And this goes for both of my SIM cards.

Also, the automatically set time zone is wrong, off by one hour. It is set to Mountain time (Rocky mountains time zone) instead of central time zone.

I just wonder if something about the phone is broken or whether there is some incompatibility, oh and if someone has a hint what to look for in the adb log I’d be very grateful!

[Stefan]

There is a high probability that the FP1 simply doesn’t work with the mobile frequency bands in the US. Check it out here:

Will my Fairphone work in another country? (How to check worldwide mobile phone frequencies)

FP1(U) frequency bands [Source] (Made availabel by the Internet archive now.) FP2 frequency bands [Source] (Made availabel by the Internet archive now.) FP3 frequency bands [Source for 2G, 3G and 4G-Bands] — [Source for 4G-Frequency-Bands] How to check the frequencies Thanks to @Irina_Spitznagel! That page - in general - is working for all phones all over the world! Another page for general information: Worldtimezone.com PS.: This is a wiki post, feel free to contribute to it, by clic…

[Johannes_Rohr]

Thanks, unfortunately, network search fails already, it returns an error and zero results, therefore I don’t even get to test the carriers. Doesn’t this look like something about the phone is broken?

[Stefan]

This looks as if there were no frequencies the Fairphone could detect. The only big US carrier that’s listed as “does work” at willmyphonework.net is T-Mobile. However, maybe they too have already switched off their 2G network in North Dakota.