Dennis Ferguson wrote:
> On 2007-03-14, Greg <x_gblum@cox.net> wrote:
>> Dennis Ferguson <dcferguson@pacbell.net> wrote:
>> news:slrneve4sk.85.dcferguson@akit-ferguson.com:
>>> I'll make a huge guess that could be entirely out to lunch. Was the
>>> place where you were spending time near Red Hook, or at least at the
>>> eastern end of the island, maybe on the north coast? And do you not
>>> have international roaming enabled on your account?
> [...]
>> You may be onto something, but not the location. I was in the south
>> central part of the island - Charlotte Amalie. I do not have
>> International Roaming on my account. It sure seemed like the scenario
>> you were describing, however. I was getting a full strength signal from
>> someone, just not Cingular. When I cycled the phone and it came back as
>> Cingular the strength was 2-3 bars. When it reverted to 'no network' it
>> jumped to full.
>
> No, that doesn't sound right. The BVI provider is already quite far
> away, and is on the other side of the hill from Charlotte Amalie.
>
> There's another possibility for CA though. Were there any cruise ships in
> the harbour when you were there? Those ships often have GSM service
> on-board now, and I think you also need international roaming enabled
> to use that service as well.
>
>> I'm betting that you may be right on and that BVI provider is the
>> culprit. Is there any way to set my phone to pick up and stick with a
>> Cingular signal regardless of its strength instead of jumping to a
>> stronger but not supported network? I would have thought this was
>> standard behavior.
>
> The option to do this is often in the menus under "Setup->Network", though
> this varies with phone model and I'm not familiar with yours.
>
> Unfortunately the phones that Cingular sells often have the network
> selection menus disabled, and the default behaviour is never the one
> you are expecting. The default usually is any-band, any-signal,
> so the phone will roam seamlessly, and you need to go to the menus
> (which may not exist) to select other behaviour.
>
> The missing network selection menus is on of the reasons I don't
> often buy Cingular phones any more since, as it seems might be the
> case in your situation, sometimes you really need them. You might
> get international roaming enabled on your account before you go again,
> since then the phone display would at least tell you what is going on
> rather than saying "No Network". If you don't have network selection
> menus on your phone you could also try to dispute any roaming charges
> you put on with Cingular when you get back; this worked for me once.
>
> Dennis Ferguson

In most cases, the manual network selection menus appear when roaming
outside of the USA with Cingular phones. They are only suppressed while
in the USA. You should be able to manually select the BVI Cingular
network by navigating to the network settings and scanning for Cingular.
I suspect that a new signal is confusing the phone and it gets stuck
on it. Give that a try the next time you roam outside of the USA.