An Awkward No-Network Experience on My Phone

Lunar New Year means heading home. Consider this the first post of the holiday.

Back in my hometown—a small county—you see QR codes everywhere. Mobile payments have finally become mainstream. Convenience and risk always travel together, and I now head out without cash. Cue the embarrassment: I went out for snacks, ready to pay with Alipay, only to notice my phone stuck on E (2.5G) instead of 4G. The vendor had already finished preparing the food, but no payment means no food. I grabbed the shop’s QR code, walked outside, and still had no data. Toggling airplane mode didn’t help. After a reboot, the signal returned, I scanned the code, and the payment went through. Still, that kind of flaky signal makes mobile payments stressful.

Because rebooting temporarily restored data, I blamed the signal. But during other outings my mom—also on China Unicom—had no issues. Same carrier, different phone. That had to be a clue.

My suspicion shifted from weak coverage to a device issue.

The next morning the network died again. Sometimes even the E icon disappeared, yet the signal bars were full. Imagine not being able to send a WeChat message unless you’re on Wi-Fi—frustrating. While venting to a friend (initially blaming the iPhone), he suggested resetting the iPhone’s network settings. I followed the steps, but nothing changed.

His next tip: call customer support. He’d seen similar issues before caused by VPN usage; the carrier had restricted network access until support manually refreshed things.

So I called. The agent said they’d switch my network profile on the backend and asked me to reboot ten minutes later. It worked immediately. To confirm, I went for a walk—solid 4G the entire time.

In hindsight, my earlier assumption was wrong. If the signal bars are full but there’s no data, it’s not a coverage problem. It’s either the phone’s network configuration or the carrier’s provisioning.

Why was I throttled in the first place? Maybe the VPN, maybe searching for something the system didn’t like—no idea. With millions of users, automated rules inevitably create false positives.

If you hit the same issue, call support. Let them reset things from their end.