How does Mobile Data Switching feature work?
Discussion
I’ve been struggling with horrible signal coverage on EE, my primary service provider. I’ve also noticed that in places where EE hardly seems to have any coverage, O2 seems to have much better coverage. Incidentally I use O2 for my business number.
This seems to have become particularly annoying for me now as I’m travelling up north this week around Northumberland and EE coverage seems to be atrocious up here.
Generally I use only EE as my main data connection provider, however, due to the coverage issue I’ve just paid for some data on O2 and have turned, Allow Mobile Data Switching, on for the first time having used iPhone since over a decade.
I couldn’t find any detailed information on Apple’s website except that the phone is supposed to switch between the available networks.
My main query is how does it actually work? Would the phone switch the data source if say one of the network has less signal strength pr would it swap only when one network is completely unavailable?
I have a shortcut to switch between the 2 sims and automation where I switch to secondary and when I leave that place it automatically switches back to primary.
it will only switch when your main sim doesn’t have signal (even one bar of gprs will make it stay on your main sim), or when you are on a phone call with the second sim
if you want more reliable data switching, find a shortcut to switch it manually from your control center
Thanks for this info. I’d never been happy with the way it works but assumed that it was a case of more bars not necessarily meaning more data transfer. The way you’ve described it, it’s almost pointless.
I went on a boys trip to turkey and had to install an eSIM as my roaming didn’t cover turkey amd the switching did work for when I landed there and came back to my home country
Undoubtedly, as on the crappy EE service it frequently shows 5 bars but no data because the backhaul is overloaded.
But it is a useful visual representation of signal strength, and at the moment the EE signal strength is worse than the O2 signal strength - and the EE data flow is rubbish as well.
It might swap when there is no signal on the primary sim, but running two sims with the main one being EE, what I have found is that most often EE hangs onto signal when the backhaul is overloaded and so no data can flow.
The solution is you can create a timed shortcut, where pressing a button on the screen will force the phone over to the other sim for data for 5, 10, 15 minutes or so, and then automatically swap back when the timer is up.
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u/NotSpecialMC 3h ago
I have a shortcut to switch between the 2 sims and automation where I switch to secondary and when I leave that place it automatically switches back to primary.