Roaming with 3 (or not)

Blaster99

I was in Spain last week and using my 3 phone (SonyEricsson K608i) was a hit and miss to put it mildly. It seems 3 has a roaming agreement with Telefonica Movistar. It seemed that when I was in 3G coverage areas, it all worked well. Some of my fellow travellers with O2 2G phones had perfect 2G Movistar coverage all the time, whereas I typically got an error saying "No access to network".

If I brought up the network list and selected Movistar 2G, it would connect to the network and then boot me out after a short period of time.

I'm guessing the problem is that 3 has mucked around with the firmware and the phone doesn't do 2G fallback properly. Is this just the way it is or is there anything I can do to sort this out?

rogue-entity

If you do have access to Movistar 2G when in 2G only areas, then that would mean you have access to the 2G network, but if you only have access when in 3G areas, then you only have access to the 3G network which may have slightly better coverage in Spain because of the near constant high-pressure.

If you want to "unlock" the feature that allows you to manualy tell the phone 2G only. Then you need to upgrade the firmware to the "generic" version. This is what I did.

Of course I have a Nokia 6680 so the firmware upgrade was done by the local service centre. I dont know of any SE centres that will do it for you, but their is no harm in asking.

1huge1

ya i was in lanzarote for the last 2 weeks and the only one i could connect to with 3 was moviestar but like the orignal poster i was registar for it then about 10mins later i got no signal and sometimes it came back mostly not
i also got a 3G signal but didnt try any video calling assuimg it would cost me a lot of money if it worked
would it of worked?

Sam Vimes

1huge1 wrote:

ya i was in lanzarote for the last 2 weeks and the only one i could connect to with 3 was moviestar but like the orignal poster i was registar for it then about 10mins later i got no signal and sometimes it came back mostly not
i also got a 3G signal but didnt try any video calling assuimg it would cost me a lot of money if it worked
would it of worked?

video call wouldnt have worked. you can find out on their website where they have 2g and 3g coverage etc

http://three.ie/ireland/iexplore/icoverage/intCountry.omp?cid=1113579183054

Dellas

Hey guys have any of you had your bills in since making those calls!!! The roaming charges are VERY high be aware!!!!