[Essential Phone Questions & Answers] v_2ryann:
Hey all,

Maybe some of you who are way smarter than me can look into this. A little background: Currently have 2 Essential phones on the T-Mobile. Ran one phone stock, upgraded to Android PIE out of the box, for about a week. Noticed it was having connection problems. The data would cut in and out (as reported by others). The signal bars were all over the place, full bars, no bars etc...

The second phone was unlocked and flashed to several different PH-1 roms, never updated to PIE. Noticed on almost all the roms when WIFI was turned on then off the phone would drop data LTE connection and it wouldn't come back. The only way found to get it back is to flip airplane mode on/off. Finally settled on AOSiP 8.1. It too had connection issues with the WIFI on/off:

https://xdaforums.com/essential-phone/development/aosip-8-1-official-t3735143

In summary, both phones had signal problems, bars jumping all over. Both phones had predictable data connection loss after WIFI on/off and no SMS messaging. Only Airplane mode would restore data and SMS.

Here are the current base-bands of each phone:

Phone1 (moon black,AOSIP): 2.0.c4-M2.0.3

Phone2 (halo grey, had PIE for a week, but now on AOSIP): 2.0.c4-M1.3.1

Ok now for the fix (?). Made a few changes to Phone1. Signal is almost full bars, and it doesn't drop signal after WIFI. SMS works fine. If fact its been working fine all day with no issues. Here are the changes I made to both phones:

Made the following changes on both phones:

1. Turned off Enhanced LTE Mode

2. Set Preferred network type to LTE/WCDMA

2. Removed all APN's except for T-Mobile, with the following:

APN: fast.t-mobile.com

Proxy: none

Port: none

Username: none

Password: none

Server: none

MMSC: http://mms.msg.eng.t-mobile.com/mms/wapenc

MMS proxy: none

MMS Port: none

MCC: 310

MNC: 260

Auth Type: none

APN TYPE: default,mms,supl,hipri,admin,mobile,dun

APN protocol: IPv6

APN roaming protocol: IPv6

Bearer: unspecified

MVNO type: none

In my testing I found that setting the APN protocol to IPv6 seemed to be what fixed the WIFI bug. Stock it was set to IPv6/IPv4. So far so good. Phone1 one has been solid all day, no connection issues. Using bluetooth headset, WIFI etc.

Now I'm confused about Phone2. It has the same settings, and the WIFI bug is gone, and its also working almost all the time. The only problem it has now is if I let it sit for 20min or so, the data connection gets lost and have to use Airplane mode to get it back.

Summary: Both phones were having signal drops and data connection issues on T-Mobile. Doing the above steps solved all the problems on Phone1. It has perfect signal and has been working fine all day. I can't break it. Most of Phone2's problems have been solved, except when it goes to sleep it looses data connection and I have to use airplane mode on/off to fix. Both phones are identical except for the baseband.

Anyone know where I could find the baseband that’s running on Phone1 so I could flash to Phone2?

Hope this is of some help to those of you on T-Mobile and having signal problems.

######### UPDATE#########

Sorry, found the radio's here:

https://xdaforums.com/essential-phone/development/stock-7-1-1-nmj20d-t3701681

Flashed the Package without boot: PPR1.180610.091 AFH (latest pie 9.0 august) to Phone2.

New baseband on phone 2 is 2.0.c4-m2.0.5.

Will get back to you on if it solved all my T-Mobile issues.

But why didn't the baseband get updated with the official OTA update to PIE?