Must turn off 3G to get phone and text

Question

I have been having problems with receiving calls and text's on my one week old 3GS. 4 out of 5 calls go right to voicemail. Some texts never come in. Also some outgoing texts lockup and don't go through. I went to AT&T and they gave me a new SIM card. That didn't help. Then they told me to reset my network settings...that didn't help. I find the only way to get consistent phone and text service is if I turn off 3G. Anybody else having this problem?

Answer 1

Same thing was happening to me when I lived in Arizona. Calls and text only worked on edge. I went through 3 phones and 2 sim cards. signal would totally drop off from 5 bars to none, "3G or E" would go away for 20-30 seconds and come back. Every time it happened I would take a screen shot of the home screen. Shows date on the calendar icon, time at the top and signal. It got to the point where I was taking screen shots 4-5 times an hour. I had over 100 screen shots of signal dropoff and failed text sent.
When I took the phone back to the Apple store they would replace it because under diagnosis it was internal resetting, 5-6 times a day. Every phone was doing it. Finally after calling applecare and AT&T 9 times. I got a call from AT&T regional telling me there was trouble with the tower in my area. He told me the Apple store had replaced 136 phones. No one knew even people working at the Apple store were replacing their phones. It took about a month until we were operational again, Apple Store stopped replacing phones and just told people to keep it on EDGE until it was fixed.
This was on my 3G my 3G(S) has been flawless...