I have recently had to travel by train a lot due to personal issues: regaining the time lost traveling by working on new content for my dear readers is a way to better cope with the hardship. Unfortunately, my trusty old Nokia N71 (powered by Hutchison/three) has issues keeping a connection stable while the train is moving fast.
However, this wouldn’t be Tamss60 if we wouldn’t have a solution: I observed that my EDGE-only Treo 680 had no such issues. It thus looks like UMTS signals are more sensitive to movement and unsuitable terrain - forcing the phone into a GSM/GPRS-only mode could theoretically help.
Easily said, quickly done - follow the steps below:
Open Settings
The first step involves opening the phones Settings application, and navigating to the network tab:
Disable UMTS
Adjust the settings so that they look like in the screenshot below - but be prepared that the phone will reboot once to reset itself:
Once the reboot is done, your phone is restricted to non-3G networks. It will log into the Hutchison network without issues, but will work at slower and more stable 2G/2.5G frequencies.
Now that my N71 is restricted to GPRS, it works a little more slowly - but I have yet to see a connection breakdown. The train already drove through a few tunnels, and the network stayed up…if that isn’t a good tradeoff, what is?
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