[Motorola Droid 4] Sjaakbanaan:
Hi all,

Is there any way to fix "SIM not supported" error on Droid 4 bootup, which leads to a missing data connection for my actual Vodafone NL SIM card (not Verizon's roaming SIM, which is also Vodafone NL)? E.g. spoofing SIM MNC?

Full story:

As I live in the Netherlands, we have not been lucky enough to officially receive the latest few Droid / Milestone series. Yet I love these phones, and now finally managed to get my hands on a Droid 4. After updating it to the .215 ICS leak I love it, it even manages to outperform my Transformer Prime for some casual tasks (browsing)!

However, I have one major problem which is the following: I cannot use my provider's data network. My phone can access both 2G and 3G networks, and I can call, send/receive SMS, no problem. But it simply will not connect to my provider's data network. I used the APN setting from their website, compared with my other phones, tried some different settings, but nothing worked.

I then purchased and tried a different provider's SIM and this worked without a hitch - perfect 2G, 3G, and HSDPA reception! This despite the fact that that specific provider was always roaming on a bigger provider's network (which makes it a little trickier - need to set it to Global mode instead of GSM)

For Vodafone NL, a known issue is that it is one of the few APNs that requires a password. Some phones need to have a config file edited to make this work ( /system/etc/ppp/peers/pppd-ril.options contains a default user/pass that needs to be replaced). This is what fixed it for my ME863 before, and I already did this on the Droid 4 as well, but to no avail (yet).

Any time I restart my phone, I get the following message:

Sorry, this SIM card is not supported. Please contact your wireless service provider.

Note that it doesn't say "unknown SIM" (which it does for other Dutch networks) and it doesn't say "unsupported or unreadable SIM" as it does with damaged SIMs. Also I have phone reception on 2G and 3G networks. The same SIM card works fine in my ME863. Just to be sure, I got the most recent micro SIM from my provider this weekend, which still didn't resolve the problem.

As mentioned in the error message, I contacted my 'wireless service provider', ie. Vodafone NL. They tried but could not help me out, which I kind of expected. With the Droid 4 not being available in Europe and all. Still it was worth a shot.

After doing some research, I found the following:

"Vodafone NL" appears to be the owner of the roaming SIM cards used by Verizon

.. this makes sense because Vodafone has a 45% stake in Verizon

Some Verizon users with (and without) global roaming setting have reported getting "Vodafone NL" in their screen - without leaving the U.S.

My phone came pre-loaded with some Vodafone NL APNs, none of which match the actual Vodafone NL APN. Instead, they seem to refer to Verizon (APN names are VZWADMIN, VZWINTERNET, VZWAPP) instead of the actual Vodafone NL APN (live.vodafone.com).

These APNs use the same MCC + MNC code as my actual Vodafone NL SIM (204 + 04).

For other SIM cards it says something like 'unknown provider', but otherwise works fine. Only for Vodafone NL it says 'unsupported'.

Of course, I manually added the APN according to the website, tried some variations, removed the 'Verizon Vodafone NL' default APNs, restored them, switched between GSM and Global, nothing worked.

Is it possible that somehow, my Vodafone NL SIM card's data is blocked because they are Verizon's roaming partner? Do they have two kinds of SIMs or some check or... well.. actually it all doesn't matter, but does anybody have any idea on how I can get my SIM to be 'supported'?

I'm thinking that somehow if I can get my SIM card recognized as having another ID (e.g. 204 + 02) it might work, but have no idea how to do that.

It seems to be a tricky one and I've searched online and in my phone config file / databases for days without result.. I'm at a loss here. Thanks in advance for any insight you may have.