I've noticed that, somewhat often out of the blue, my N9 will appear to have reception and a 3.5G connection displayed in the status bar but actually is not receiving calls or texts. When it's like this, I can only tell if this happens when I try to make a call and get a message that it fails or if I reboot the phone and get bombarded by texts or voicemails I was waiting for.

I did a brief search but didn't get any results, maybe I am using the wrong terms. Any idea what causes this and what steps I can take to identify/fix this?

Additionally, the phone tends to be very slow at loading webpages and 40% of the time will fail to load it in comparison to a Lumia 521 and an iPhone 4 which work acceptably when tried in the same room. I am on T-Mobile USA and the iPhone does not even have the 1700mhz HSPDA band, which makes me wonder what to do.

Would really appreciate some help, if I can't get a handle on this I'm going to have to stick to the iPhone.

I had the same issue with an old Symbian ^3 device while on T-Mobile USA. It turned out to be a software problem. I restored to factory settings WITHOUT restoring my back-up (restoring my back-up after restoring to factory settings was bringing the problem back).

Don't know if this is the same issue you are having, or just a coincidence, however, that phone has been working well since then.

Thanks, I'm planning to do a full wipe and switch to an openmode kernel to get bluetooth PAN functionality, I made this thread to see if there was a way to avoid this radio issue in the future in case I'm too lazy to reflash my phone.

Its a known bug which Nokia never fixed. Listed here (cached version as the original site has been taken offline):
https://harmattan-bugs.nokia.com/show_bug.cgi?id=79

Phone drops network connection without any visible indications shown on screen, the signal strength meter can be full and 3G icon active but the phone has no connection with the outside world.
The only way to get the phone back online is to power off the device (toggling flight mode sometimes helps).

From what I learn this problem often occurred in areas where the phone had access to a lot of different cell-towers but where these cells also was under quite heavy load due to many simultaneous users.
I also noticed similar behaviour when travelling and the phone frequently had to switch between different cell-towers.

The "Nokia Link" update is said to make it better but I still had this issue after that one installed (but maybe a little less frequent) .

The solution for me was to use the phone in GSM mode when in these problem areas.

To not have to use the phone in GSM mode all the time I used the excellent program ProfileMatic. By creating a rule which detected ID-numbers of the cell-towers in the areas where the phone used to drop connection I could have ProfileMatic automatically toggle between GSM and dual mode.

//j

I had a very similar problem with my N900. See my post here. But it turned out to be a HW problem.

With my N9, I also have connection issues, but they are slightly different. See here. In my case the reception bars and the 3G symbol disappear. After a minute, I am prompted to ether the PIN. It then works for a while and disconnects again. Frustrating...

Are you using a MicroSIM, or did you just cut one from a MiniSIM (2FF, the one half the size of an adult thumb)?

I had this problem when I used a MiniSIM on both my N9 and a Galaxy Note 2, the problem quickly went away when I got a MicroSIM ("3FF")

For me this problem was not related to the SIM-card.
I tested a number of different cards from different service providers, all real MicroSIMs.

I also had this issue with all the N9 phones I have owned (I think I am on my sixth N9 right now. Tend to get irritated on them and buy something else but then I miss them and go back). Thus quite sure it is not HW failures in some single devices but a design flaw present in all the phones.

On the other hand, I have numerous friends and colleagues not having any trouble at all with their N9 phones which indicates that the problem is caused by a combination of things.

//j