topic iPhone 7 stuck on Searching in Devices

iPhone 7 stuck on Searching

Silverhand — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 17:38:28 GMT

I have an account with Three that I use in an iPhone 7, the signal dropped about a week ago and continually says "Searching", I took it into a Three store today and they swapped the SIM to a new one which does the same.

They said it's due to three changing their 3g signal, although the phone does show 4g in the network settings and "should" work, it doesn't.

Has anyone had any success using an iPhone 7 since Three dropped the 3g network?

Re: iPhone 7 stuck on Searching

PeteG — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:08:04 GMT

Hello, Silverhand.

Welcome to the Three Community.

The 3G network was switched off in September, so I think it's unlikely that the phone would just be seeing the impact of that now. It's also a 4G phone so shouldn't have issues connecting to a 4G network.

It could be an issue with the phone, have you tried any other SIM cards in the phone to see if those networks can be found?

Pete.

Re: iPhone 7 stuck on Searching

jr0 — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 14:05:17 GMT

Hi
I'm on a area where 3G has been swithced off.
And I have an old Nokia android where I can have data and sms but no voice calls.

I believe the voice calls do not work because 1) my handset doesn't support VoLTE ("voice over 4G/data") and 2nd) as 3G is not available the the phone/network cannot fallback to 3G to handle voice

I'm just wondering if your iphone 7 is smilar to my case but because iphone cannot get "voice service" is showing displaying this weird behavior of searching for network (despite having data over 4G)... just another theory

Re: iPhone 7 stuck on Searching

jr0 — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 18:54:25 GMT

@Silverhand I looked up iPhone 7 on apple support and seems to support VoLTE. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/111943

So PeteG has a point, could it be something with the phone? Do as mentioned by him and try another operator sim on the iPhone 7