EE mobile 4g no voice calls suddenly, home locale

[Perplex3]

Hi.  PAYG 4g mobile - suddenly lost capability for voice calls from home, and from on our street near our home. Messaging only. This is new, sudden, happening. Both messaging and voice calls work fine from up the road, all around the neighbourhood. This is in London W1K.  One of us is with Vodaphone, not having any problems. Just the 4g EE phones.  Checking EE coverage online, no problems listed anywhere. Does anyone have any idea what might have happened?

[XRaySpeX]

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@Perplex3 wrote:

suddenly lost capability for voice calls from home, and from on our street near our home.

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Can you make calls from anywhere else?

[Perplex3]

Both calls and messaging work fine once the phone is up the road from our block of flats. It is a few feet after turning into our road that it cuts out.

[Perplex3]

As if we are in a new 'blind spot' or as if something is blocking 4g.

[bristolian]

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@Perplex3 wrote:

Hi.  PAYG 4g mobile - suddenly lost capability for voice calls from home, and from on our street near our home. Messaging only. This is new, sudden, happening. 

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Does this mean you have had 4G coverage at your home location, but have lost it recently? If so...

If you've not done so already, try toggling flight mode to ensure your phone hasn't "dropped off" available coverage.

Use the "check service status" option on https://ee.co.uk/help/mobile-coverage-checker  in the first instance, to check for local service outages. The "report a problem" link should be used if no issues are reported but EE users continue to have issues.A loss of coverage will remove the ability to make/receive calls, send/receive texts or use mobile data.

If you're in the UK and have a WiFi connection, you can use WiFi-calling to keep using your phone as normal without needing network coverage.

[Perplex3]

We have EE PAYG phones. Both worked fine until very recently. Suddenly the older, 4G, phone lost voice call capability at home and on our street. The other is new 5G and both messaging and voice calls are still working. The 4G phone was taken for a walkabout - messaging is OK all around the area and in a wider area. Voice calls on the other end go dead when they reach a few steps into our street, and do not work in the courtyard, on the stairs or in the flat.

Both phones have WiFi calling on, but this has not helped because we have had a major reduction in internet signal strength for several days. We do now have wifi again but I think it is not the full strength it was yet.
As both happened at once, and as all EE phones here had problems connecting at all in the flat initially, it was beginning to feel a bit weird!  Messaging came back after a day.  The phone using Vodaphone has no problems at all. It is just the 4G EE users.
We have no 3G in the area at all, and the local EE 2G mast was decommissioned recently.

[bristolian]

A few bits in your last post, I'll ignore the popular misspelling of Vodafone!

EE switched off their 3G network a year or so ago now, but "2G mast" & "4G mast" is another popular misconception - radio sites are not specific to any "G", and all carry multiple technologies.

The only obvious reason for a 5G phone working, and 4G not, is that there is a fault on your local serving site but is only affecting the 4G coverage layers, and you're using 5G-SA. 5G in NSA mode would rely on 4G for voice fallback. It would be unusual for there to be no 4G-coverage available from surrounding sites, but I am speculating based on your reported symptoms. Use the "check status" tool that I mentioned in my previous post.

Not sure what you mean by your WiFi not being full-strength, but a working wireless router with ~2-3Mb/s should be plenty sufficient.

[XRaySpeX]

I think for "WiFi" read "mobile signal".

[Perplex3]

We have simultaneously had problems with our broadband via the landline. There was no wifi in the home, only ethernet cables worked. It came back on today. Not helpful as there was no wifi alternative for the 4G phones to switch to.

[Perplex3]

We did lots of outage searching, etc, but only on the first day were people reporting some issues in the local area. Status on the 4G mobile phone was No Network. We spoke twice to EE tech agents using our landline, and once to a non-tech agent. It was the latter who looked up masts in the area, and told us that the very nearby 2G one had recently been decommissioned, but no record of why on the data he was looking at. It was also the non-tech agent who did something at his end and messaging suddenly worked. But voice calls never did return.  Voice calling works well if the 4G phone is taken 30 metres from our flat to a point just up the road.

I will phone EE Customer Services again tomorrow and ask if there could be a fault affecting 4G coverage at our local serving site. Alternatively, maybe we never had good 4G coverage very locally here, and the 4G phones were relying on 2G for voice calls. Now that is gone. If the latter, we will have to switch from EE to another service.

It is lucky that we still have our landline phone, as it is the only way I could phone EE. If I use the 5G phone, 'pressing' the menu option number that I need has no result. If I press '1' by using the keypad, that is fine. If I press '2' nothing happens. Some landline phones have been switched off already in this area. Mobile phones will be more essential. I have neighbours who are not able to go out much at all, and rely on their phones for a lot.