I purchased an iPhone 5 on pre-order day, and have had it now for a few weeks. A few days ago, I noticed my service flicker from "Searching..." to "No Service" to "Verizon LTE". I didn't think much of it, but in a few moments, it happened again. And again. And again. Finally, my service went from 5 bars to 0, then "Searching...". I left the phone alone for a while thinking there was maintenance being done on a tower, however, over the course of a few hours, I was still getting the "Searching..." message. I've tried popping out the SIM card and re-seating it, I've tried resetting network settings, power cycling, hard rebooting (home and wake/sleep together until it resets)... I have noticed however, that when I pop the SIM card out now, I don't get a "No SIM" message. I just get a "Searching..." message.
I managed to get service back after a few hours of wondering, and a restore from backup (which was a fight in itself). However, my phone has once again fallen silent, even though it was working perfectly fine yesterday.
Did I do something? I've only dropped my phone once, and it was onto a carpeted surface from about knee high, so I highly doubt that was the cause. Is it a SIM card problem? I know it's not a service problem as my wife's phone (iPhone 5 on the same plan) is working flawlessly (and she's dropped hers a few times already).
Did I just get a defective model? This is extremely frustrating, and my work requires that I have a phone, so the faster this can be answered, the better!!
