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Verizon unlocked phone, extremely poor reception in EU

Hi everybody,

My main phone died on me so i had to resort to a backup that i just had laying around, since i had to unexpectedly leave for the EU, it's an older phone: S20 Ultra and i'm using it with a local carrier SIM, carrier name is Orange i believe, this is where the nightmare starts because Jesus all mighty it has the worst reception of any phone that i've ever seen in my entire life. I get literally zero signal indoors, maybe 1 bar if i'm lucky in places, reception is so bad that it constantly disconnects from network, it's pretty much unusable as is. If there's anybody here that has experience with using US phones internationally, are there any special settings that you have to check or is there something Verizon has to do, to make this thing properly connect to global networks, some hidden setting or whatever, i refuse to imagine every US phone is this bad when used with foreign carriers on other continents!

Thanks

Comments

SynthpopAddict

Is this S20 a Verizon model? Carrier phones are optimized to run with that carrier which is one of the reasons why the carrier software is put on them, but with Verizon being a CDMA-based network and pretty much everybody else in the world (even Verizon's US competitors) using GSM-based technology, makes me wonder if there's a conflict. Or maybe it's just that local carrier you're using isn't very good? If it's possible, see if you can change the band on your phone. Newer Samsung phones you can't band select anymore, but you might still be able to do it on an S20, so try getting it to where it can run on 3G mode and anything newer.

I_Am_Weasel

Thanks for your reply, not sure what you mean when you say "change the band" is that the mobile network setting that allows you to chose from 4G/3G/2G to something else? If that's the case, i already tried that and it made very little difference, a few dbm minus in terms of signal strength but nothing spectacular. Orange is a huge carrier here and they've been around for a really long time, i would imagine they got their infrastructure sorted at this point.

SynthpopAddict

You're welcome. Sorry that I missed your phone is an unlocked Verizon model earlier when I was asking (duh!). As to your question, yes, that's what I meant when referring to changing the band. It's unfortunate that your S20 still isn't working well after trying that. The only other thing I can suggest is to contact Orange and see if they can tweak your phone somehow to get it to work better. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the Verizon software on your phone making it want to run in CDMA mode and not GSM, as Orange would be using GSM.

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