Technical issue - no signal after roaming, and impossible to contact EE

[tomkerswill]

I have a fairly new EE SIM on pay monthly, provided by my business. I traveled to Spain earlier this week and from that point on had no signal at all. Roaming is enabled in my iPhone settings for the SIM.  I'd traveled to Spain two weeks prior to this and I can see I did receive the "Welcome to Spain" text at that point.

Since returning to the UK yesterday, I also have had no signal. It looks as if there's no way to contact EE except for by phone, and I'm unable to do this . 

I've tried restarting the iPhone and removing the SIM (at which point it says NO SIM) and reinserting it (where I can see the SIM settings but simply don't get a signal).

I saw some forum messages saying you can contact EE live in the app. However, I don't see the "Messsage Us" button, and I suspect that's because I don't have the contract added to my account yet. To do this requires a verification SMS, which I can't receive because there's no signal.

I do see that I can send a letter in the post, but I can't see how that's going to help with troubleshooting a technical issue!

I suspect this must be some kind of account issue or some kind of block that happened due to being out of the country; but without being able to contact EE it's fairly tough to resolve.

Any idea of where I can go next? Thanks!

[Christopher_G]

Hi @tomkerswill 

Welcome to the community.

Could you please check to make sure that the network selection is set as 'automatic'?

Tap Settings > Mobile Service > Network Selection > Automatic.

Also, it may be worth making sure the software on the iPhone is completely up to date.

Chris

[bristolian]

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@tomkerswill wrote:

Roaming is enabled in my iPhone settings for the SIM.

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To avoid other users getting misadvised, roaming itself is not a phone setting that checking a menu option enables. The menu option you're referring to is most likely "data roaming" which merely enables the use of data whilst already roaming.

Roaming is an account-level feature which needs enabling on your SIM.

In your case - does EE show if you perform a manual network search? If yes - try selecting it. If no - you have a local coverage issue.

[tomkerswill]

Thanks! Yes; it was set to automatic. To troubleshoot, I verified that I could turn automatic off, and see a list. In the UK, that included EE. But after selecting EE, there was still no signal, and I set it back to automatic.

Software is also completely up-to-date.

[tomkerswill]

Ah, I understand - thanks for clarifying.  Yes - I mean that the "Data Roaming" setting was enabled on phone settings.  and that I was roaming (eg. traveling with phone) in Spain - but had no signal showing at all.

Automatic network selection was initially enabled, but I also tried a manual network search in order to troubleshoot. When troubleshooting during roaming in Spain, I chose Vodafone ES, and when back in UK I chose EE. They did appear on the manual list. I then turned automatic selection back on.

I did finally get it resolved.   With no way to contact EE, I asked my financial director to make contact from his phone, and this resolved things pretty quickly.   

The problem was that EE seem to have disconnected the phone/SIM, about two weeks after successfully porting my number. The old/temporary number was cancelled when the port succeeded, and somehow this seems to have made them think they needed to cancel the whole service.

They updated a setting on their end (presumably reenabled it) and the phone connected without me needing to do anything further.

It's frustrating - as there was no warning or communication from EE, and no way of me contacting them. With business accounts, it's also quite hard to manage having multiple users (seems like the account owner has to make contact to manage technical issues with individual users).  We'll potentially look to go for a company with more robust user management and ways of making contact; but for now, am really pleased it's resolved, and thanks so much for your help on here.

[bristolian]

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@tomkerswill wrote:

It's frustrating - as there was no warning or communication from EE, and no way of me contacting them. With business accounts, it's also quite hard to manage having multiple users (seems like the account owner has to make contact to manage technical issues with individual users).  We'll potentially look to go for a company with more robust user management and ways of making contact

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It's completely normal, across the entire telecoms industry, for account changes to require account holder authorisation.

What you can do on any account - business included - is to enable a third party to have their own access to an account with their own password. Many business accounts are setup this way, with multiple members of staff from, say, accounts or admin, to have account access to manage low-level issues.

The alternative is to have a total free-for-all with account access.