E7 restarts seem to be caused by T-Mobile/Orange r...

Question

So, I got my Blue E7 from Nokia Direct on Friday last week, on a T-Mobile contract.  As I got it set up as I liked I noticed that the phone would occasionally restart itself.  Initially I put this down to trying to do too much all at the same time, but it even started happening as I moved between rooms in the house when I wasn't doing anything at all, and also when I was driving and only using the satnav facilities.  In order to try and isolate the problem I tried reinstalling PR1.1 via Ovi Suite and then did full factory settings reset (wipe all), with the intention of only installing one piece of software at a time to isolate the problem, but it appeared almost straight away.
[as an aside, if you ever, press the menu key straight after booting it's quite interesting to see how many apps start (showing the little circle) and close immediately after boot - on S60 models you could see all these by holding down the menu key, but on Symbian^3 they don't show up in the "Open applications" screen]
I was lost for a solution, checked all settings, tried all sorts of other avenues and was beginning to think my phone might just be from a bad batch.  Then I thought that the connection between the situations might be related to the roaming arrangement between T-Mobile and Orange.  If you have *no* signal on the T-Mobile network then the SIM is allowed to roam onto the Orange network - note that it isn't seamless roaming like some other operators do (Three/Orange I think?) - it's the same roaming that you do when you go abroad - apparently seamless roaming may come later in the year.  Now in my house I have very patchy T-Mobile coverage, so if I move around the house it will often lose signal and try Orange instead, and the part of Devon I was driving around also has patchy T-Mobile reception, so the same would have been happening.
To test my theory, this morning I set the "Operator Selection" in "Network Settings" to "Manual" and chose T-Mobile as the operator, and so far I have had no further problems at all with the phone rebooting, so it looks like the roaming between networks cold well have been causing the problem.  I will give it a few more days to see if the rebooting has definitely stopped, and if it has then I will know for sure that the roaming was the issue.
To be honest, in the normal roaming situation it probably makes sense for the phone to reboot, but not if I am just moving around my house!  And if T-Mobile and Orange sort out the seamless roaming then I won't have a problem because the masts will do soft handovers between the two operators and my phone won't get upset.  For the moment I can stick to setting the manual network to T-Mobile (I would set it to Orange but then I would get no 3G) but it's annoying if I am out of network that the option to select a new operator always comes up when I press the home button.
If it turns out that the regular switches between T-Mobile and Orange were causing the reboots, does anyone know if I will be able to permanently opt out of the Orange roaming facility, so my SIM only tries to register on T-Mobile?  I read something online from last year about sending a text to 2121 but I can't find anything more recent.  I have contacted T-Mobile to ask the same question but have had no reply yet.
Hopefully this will help someone else with a similar problem, and if anyone else has experienced the same it would be great to know!
Al Reynolds

Answer 1

This is a very interesting theory ! I was on Vodafone when I recieved my E7 , so used a Virgin PAYG sim to try the E7 until I knew I was happy with it, but whilst running 2 phones, one on VF and the other on Virgin, I noticed the reception was MUCH better with Virgin both at home and at Work (which strangely enough , are the two places I use my phone the most !  ) so I decided to dump VF and go with Virgin instead for 3.5G instead of Edge. My point is AFAIK Virgin 'piggyback' on the Orange/T-Mobile agreement, and I didn't have the issue, despite working in an extremely bad reception area ? Don't know if the Virgin system works any differently, Oh and it's a brand new sim.
Very happy with the E7 and Virgin at the moment 
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