[Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Guides, News, & Discu] icanfly77:
I see this is a very old post hopefully someone may know the answer.

I have been in a wealth of pain for about 6 months with my Note 20 Ultra 5G with Optus Australia

The issue:

in certain areas in Brisbane, Australia I will be using my phone whilst on 5g and one of 2 things happens:

1) The phone signal will completely drop out, on status bar shows the no signal icon and I have no service. 5 seconds or so later it will come back to 5g and I am online again (this is the most common)

2) I am using the phone and it shows 5g and a signal strength however the internet drops out and I have to do flight mode on/off or mobile data off/on to get it back. If I dont, I will have no internet even if I move to another tower

I am pretty savvy and have tried to do my own troubleshooting first. It seemed to happen not longer after I switched from physical Sim to ESim so I thought it was an e-sim issue so I went back to a physical but still happened after that. Went back and forth a few times physical -> esim -> physical (didnt fix)

I did a network settings reset to no avail and then a full factory reset and still no fix

To recap, it only happened on 5g if I put the network mode to max 4g it never happened, nor did it happen if I still had the network mode set to 5g but I was only getting 4g

Then I had a Telstra prepaid 5g service running (both on esim and pyhsical) and had 0 issues in any area of Brisbane!

So I rang Optus and complained what was happening and was told the tower where it was happening the most (in my workplace) had issues but was due to be fixed about 2 weeks later - I told them well its happening in multiple locations but they said those towers have issues too :S

needless to say after the time passed when the towers were meant to be fixed, the issue still occurred. I noticed also I had the Telstra esim and the optus physical sim both turned on and still using optus for the 5g, when the dropout happened it knocked out both the telsta and the optus servce! Surely if its an optus only issue only the optus service would drop out and Telstra would be unaffected.

I googled the issue didnt find much except a similar issue but they took it in for service and found the motherboard was at fault and replaced.

I then went to other office workers who also had Samsung phones (S23 I think) with optus 5g and they told me they had no issues with their 5g at all!

I also put another optus 5g sim in the phone and it still happened (ok so its not an issue with my account) and also put my sim in that other 5g phone and no issues

ok so my phone is the problem then!

I also wanted to see when it happened what 5g band was I using as I know the tower where I was just got upgraded and the issue wasnt happening before then and it looked like when the phone was on nr78? Which is what brought me to this thread because I am a bit confused about 5g bands

When I did it before it showed:

LTE-BASIC Info

Band: 7 BW: 20Mhz

DL & UL Frequency: 3350 / 21350

MIMO Mode/MIMI RI: TBD / 1

Service CellID: xxxx

Home PLMN: 505 02

Registered PLMN: 505 02

RSRP:-96 RSRQ: -13 RSSI: -62

TAC: 57504 SINR -3

RRC: CONNECTED

WAKEUP_INFO: 63

NR Information

UplayerInd: 1

RestrictDCNR: 0

NR MO: NULL

ENDC Status: ACTIVE

SGC Failure Cause: --

NR-MTSC: OFF

NR Band 78 NR_ARFC: 632736

NR PCI: 117

NR-CBHW: 60, BWP: 1

NR-SRB3: 0

NR-SSB Index: 2

NR-SSB RSRP: -82

NR-SCS: 30

NR:RSRP:-83, RSRQ:-1

anyhoo I ended up taking the phone to Samsung and they told me there was no issue with phone, 5g diagnostics checked out ok and suggested in the logs there were 5g faults saying it was a a provider issue so back to Optus I go and they still try to tell me its a tower issue even though I said how come other people in my office with Optus and Samsung phones are not having any issues because if the tower was faulty they would be having the issue too and potentially 1000's of other customers too but they are not

I said it either has to be a compatibility issue with the Note 20 Ultra 5g on that band on Optus which would explain with co-workers with s23 arent having an issue or its an issue with my imei and your network

They agreed to finally look into the issue at a network level

My phone came back and funny it seems I have not had the issue yet! I even went to my workplace last night for about an hour and not one dropout (in some cases I had the phone drop out 3 times in 30 seconds) Also I could force it to drop out by doing a speed test and as soon as my speed test went up the signal would cut

I did the service info and noticed this time under LTE-Basic Info it was now only connected into to Band 28 BW: 10Mhz

So it makes me wonder why does it show LTE-Basic Info when the phone is on 5G? Does 5G use LTE bands as well or something and I am quite confused about all of this when I google 5g bands there is band NR78 and there is a band 7 which I think is called NR1? How can my phone be connected to both at the same time?

My phone is compatible with those bands and all the bands optus uses and it makes me wonder if Optus have realised oh theres an issue with Note 20 and this particular band so they disabled a note 20 from being able to connect to that band which is why last night it would only stay on LTE Band 28 now and wouldnt go to band 7?

If thats the case I can go back to them and maybe demand a different phone since they have sold me one thats not compatible with their network? I am taking the other phone there tonight to see if it will still connect to Band 7 and then I might know more

So frustrating!

Thanks!