Calls go thru BUT no sound in or out at either end

[HoosierDaddy]

My father has a new Idol4S on T-Mobile.

Today, just a few days after activation, he tells me he can get and make calls but neither party can hear the other.

That would seem to rule out just a mic or speaker problem on the new phone. Which is why I don't know if this is a Windows issue, an Idol 4S issue or a T-Mobile issue.

He didn't say if this only happens at home but he does use a home router provided by T-Mobile and the phone may use WiFi calling, although I thought I read that T-Mobile killed that for Windows phones.

Anyone ever have this problem and what was the cause/fix?

 

[anon(9275303)]

Yes, with both a 950XL and an Idol 4S using T-Mobile. It would occur out the blue, once or twice a month, and happened both at home and away. It happened even with a strong LTE signal. A soft reset of the phone would solve the problem for a while until the next occurrence. Never had this issue occur again after I switched to an Android last June.

 

[Sarahjoie]

My Opinion though is that this is not a router or network error. I think its more of a technical problem popularly known as "earpiece fault" and can e corrected by a phone/GSm engineer.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

I didn't hear the conversation he had with T-Mobile, but he tells me they fixed something on their end and everything works now.

Not comforting that he understood them to say it had something to do with his phone being turned off for 2 weeks during a cruise. Not comforting because (a) its a brand new phone activated AFTER the cruise, and (b) this phone had been working fine after activation.

 

[T Moore]

Maybe T-Mobile is still faking calls. This is 2 days ago

T-Mobile has agreed to pay a $40 million fine to settle a federal investigation into its former practice of faking ring tones when calls couldn't connect in rural areas. The Federal Communications Commission announced the settlement Monday, saying that in the course of the agency's investigation, T-Mobile acknowledged it had injected such false ring tones into "hundreds of millions of calls."

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603247797/t-mobile-fined-40m-over-false-ring-tones-that-masked-failed-calls

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Not fixed.

Still happening but just some times. And its happening to his wife's phone (L640) also. I guess that pretty much rules out hardware. And my wife has used the same phone as my father for ~ a year, both T-Mobile Idol 4S for Windows without any problems, so not likely related to a combination of T-Mobile and that T-Mobile phone.

This morning I got multiple calls from both phones while driving (blue-tooth). Both times, I couldn't hear anyone on the line, so said hello a half dozen times and hung up. They later said they either didn't hear anything or heard a "garbled" voice that they could not make out any words. I wish there wasn't the added variable of blue-tooth for those calls, but never had any problem with blue-tooth calls in the past.

Its hard to get information about where it happens. I know it happens at his home and he "thinks" it happens elsewhere. If just at his home and just sometimes, could be some interference or problem with a tower? That would explain two model phones with the same problem. But if it really does happen elsewhere, that's out the window.