Virgin PAYG, bought on Saturday from a Virgin shop. Every so often, with gaps ranging from 10mins to over an hour, it gives a bong-bong when the missus is at work. It's not only driving her nuts but her colleagues as well. She's in a poor reception area for Virgin (Telford) and we finally worked out it was signalling a switch from Virgin to Orange or back again - just when it's lying on the desk.

We hunted high and low in menus and instructions and finally contacted Sony Ericsson, who gave the answer we did NOT want - it can't be turned off.


I interpret this as meaning it's Virgin's fault but that it happens with ALL Sony Ericsson phones (our old Samsungs never made a noise when switching). It makes absolutely no difference to us which network it's using as long as it works!

So it looks like either we change that phone (after already having changed two VM820s with faulty keyboards) or change networks.

Any advice gratefully received

She shouldn't have it turned on at work, simple solution, turn it off !

Can't you just lock it to either network to stop it roaming?

I lock mine to virgin (Orange) as Virgin (T-Mobile UK) coverage is very poor here.

Haven't got the phone here at present but is that something that can usually be done easily on any phone?

Usually yes unless a network has disabled the option in the firmware of their branded handsets like 3 usually does last time I checked.

Don't know that SE handset but a quick search beings up:
http://virgin.tmtx.co.uk/faqs/item/?...ct_the_network

You'll have to get her to experiment as to which network gives the best performance at her most common locations.

Many thanks - will try that when she gets home. Apart from that she likes the phone and if it saves us a trip to Coventry it's worth spending time on it

Thanks for that link - made it very easy, and we've now set it to Orange.

Hopefully when she goes back to work on Monday it'll no longer be a problem...

Well, while that helped (thanks again ), it hasn't cured it...

We switched it to Orange as the preferred network and it stayed on that for most of the day. Then in the middle of the afternoon it chimed, and had changed to Virgin. A couple of minutes later it was back on Orange.

So we're obviously missing some stage that will *force* it to stay on Orange. Further help would be much appreciated

Not sure then, I take it you did select Orange after manually searching for networks?

With my usual Nokia and Android devices once its set to manual it will not go back to another network unless the device is reset to automatic or manually selecting another network.

We had assumed that just giving Orange priority would lock it. Wrong!

Thanks to you, drabble, we eventually found the option to search Manually or Automatically. For the benefit of anyone with a similar problem doing a search here.... Settings>Connectivity>Mobile Networks>Search Mode.

Hopefully.....

Ah I see you used the preferred network list, this will only set which order of networks to use in range if accessible.

You'll have to set it to automatic or manually search for a new network if no network is found for a prolonged period (no Orange coverage) or roaming abroad.

Hope it works ok for you now.