A53 randomly drops incoming calls!?

[woody johnson]

A brand new Galaxy A53 randomly rings or decides to reject and send to voicemail incoming calls. Already had it back from a Samsung service center with main board and what not replaced. And, no, it's not a matter of settings - it's a new phone with defaults across the board, absolutely no callers or services blocked at service provider level. It's absolutely random....sometimes calls will go through, sometimes it won't ring and the caller receives the default message that user is unreachable!!!

How is it even possible that the exact same problem persists????

[AndrewL]

@woody johnson: I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing persistent issues with your Galaxy A53. Is the issue present in all locations, or just certain ones? Are you able to try your SIM card in another compatible device to see if the problem persists? Although I appreciate that you may have checked this previously, please take a look at the following steps to see if you're able to resolve the problem.

1. Open the Phone app > Tap the 3 dots in the top right > Settings > Block numbers > Block unknown/private numbers > Off. While you're here, tap on Block spam and scam calls, and toggle this off as well. Tap the Back button to return to the Phone settings landing page > Supplementary services > Check your Call barring and Call forwarding settings. 

2. Settings > Notifications > Do not disturb > Off. 

[woody johnson]

No. None of these solutions make any difference. As I have already explained, there are no user/call barring options active, neither on the phone itself, nor at mobile provider level. The latter has also been confirmed by the operator themselves.

Again and again - it's random - sometimes a call will go through, a few minutes later a call from the exact same caller will be rejected and the A53 will receive an SMS about a missed call.  

[TessM]

That is really odd @woody johnson . Is the coverage good when that happens? Have you been having this issue since you got the phone or has this started recently?

Have you checked if there are any software and/or apps updates available for it? For the software please head into the phone Settings> Software update> Download and install. For the apps you will need to check both the Galaxy Store and the Google Play Store> Menu> My apps/My apps & games> Update all. 

[woody johnson]

It's a brand new phone and seems to exhibit this problem with one particular sim card. The actual plastic card has been replaced since, and the service provider double-checked and confirmed there are no service barring settings on their end.

Yet the problem persist - say in the morning it will work fine and in the afternoon the A53 will start dropping calls to voicemail. 

I'm at my wit's end here....

[woody johnson · Accepted solution]

Quick update, hope this helps someone with the same issue.

As soon as I limited the phone to 2G/3G networks the problem disappeared. Apparently this is traced back to an issue with the carrier that starved the 2g/3g bands, and every now and then when the phone needs to fall back to those frequencies it's nocked off the network for lack of capacity. Coincidentally, this particular carrier does not support A53 for VoLTE, which seems to be the actual reason to attempt all these fallbacks that are prone to failing.

[klj63]

I was having same problem with My new Samsung A53. It is preset to accept VoLTE calls. Checked with my network provider on Google and they don't use VoLTE so I change it in phone settings to 5g/LTE/3g/2g. Not all mobile phone providers use VoLTE.

[Maslany]

I have the exact same problem, with the same phone.

First the problem occured only ay home where the network is pretty bad, but lately it happens randomly, on many places even when the network is good.

I bought the phone at the beginning of january, the first 2 days when it was brand new had several missed calls, and then it had like 20 days when it didn't get any missed call at all, but then it started again and i'm seriously thinking of selling it! 

I don't know if an update is gonna change anything? Is it a known issue for A53?