SMS received very late, modem sleeping?

Hardware Librem 5
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21

For now I’ve removed the udev rule so that power saving on the usb port is back to auto. The battery drain (I’d say it more than halved the battery life) wasn’t worth the limited if any improvement in reachability.

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22

When I remove the udev rule, the problem persists. Now, I have to write a bug report.

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23

I wrote a small bug report against Mobian as a first step:

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24

If I don’t succeed in finding a solution to this problem with the Librem 5, I’ll have to consider buying yet another Pinephone and hope that the modem and/or the screen will last this time.

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25

I haven’t found a satisfying solution to my problem, I bought a third Pinephone, I’ll switch back in some days.

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26

I stopped using the workaround on the power control as it caused too much problems on the long term, I’m still investigating.

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27

I found that in my case it was caused by the modem being in 4G. I had to switch to “2G only“ mode to make SMS work.

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28

@jjakob Thank you, I switched to “2G, 3G (preferred)” about 2 days ago and now I no longer have to perform a phone call to make SMS work anew, SMS don’t arrive with a dely. It’s an unsatisfying workaround as I have to switch back to “2G, 3G, 4G (preferred)“ when I want to use the Access Point Name for the Internet, but it’s currently very helpful and it seems to indicate that the root cause lies in 4G support.

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29

How does it work with just 2G and 4G enabled (without 3G)?

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@dos Such a choice isn’t available in the combo box named “Network mode” (translated from French “Mode du réseau”). How can I do to test your suggestion? I chose “2G, 3G (preferred)” instead of “2G only” in order to be able to receive and send SMS and MMS.

P.S: If I get rid of this problem, putting a Librem 5 into the hands of some non technical users daily by warning them about the limitations will become doable.

31

Looks like it’s just an omission in the GUI. You can set it via mmcli:

sudo mmcli -m any --set-allowed-modes='2G|4G' --set-preferred-mode=4G

You can try with 2G as preferred mode as well.

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32

@dos Ok I can try both. I prefer testing all this during several days because it’s more relevant. Sometimes the problems happen after several hours of tries.

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33

Thanks for showing me that it can be set, but I tried to set the preferred mode to 2G, the command exited successfully with no error, but the modem still switched to 4G, at least as shown in the top left status area in the GUI, even with mobile data turned off. It should have stayed at 2G. I have to try if SMS work in 3G too. For now I switched it back to 2G only as I only rarely use data for internet or MMS. I’ll wait to see what the results of @gouessej testing is.

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34

That’s not how it works, it’s up to the modem to decide what “preferred” means and when to respect it.

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35

Also, the world is not staying at 2G so any workaround that relies on using either 2G or 3G sounds “short term”.

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@irvinewade I agree with you, but it could help to find the culprit so that we can enable 4G anew later once fixed. Is the situation different when using another modem?

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@dos Sending SMS stops working immediately after switching to “2G, 4G (preferred)” in command line, there’s no need to wait, it started to work badly at 15:19 (Paris timezone).

38

I assume you have already tried with IMS/VoLTE disabled?

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@dos I didn’t. How to do that?

40

Use bm818-tool.