This has been the case for at least a year now, but it was only yesterday I discovered the F Orange workaround.
This has been verified with
2 x Samsung S7, voda contract
1 x Samsung T705, voda contract
All different versions of android.
On the default F SFR, the phone shows H+ (HSPA i.e. several times faster than basic 3G) but there is absolutely no data passing through. Not even a few hundred bytes.
The phone has to be forced to connect to Orange; it doesn’t do it automatically. You have to use the manual network search. Then you get a really fast 4G.
Location was Le Touquet, most recently yesterday.
About 6 months ago I spent hours on the phone to the muppet call centre in India somewhere trying to get this fixed, and the muppet claimed I had “GPRS roaming disabled” so he re-enabled it. It (or some piece of incidental luck) worked for a few months.
It’s amazing this can persist for so long…
I had a lot of problems with data roaming in Corsica last week and neither F SFR nor Orange did work at all while Bouygues worked but the connection was often bad. I have three data roaming plans enabled so no way this can be reason plus in-EU data roaming is by default enabled and priced as same as national data traffic.
Replicated yesterday with someone else’s phone; this time an Iphone.
But he was getting little bits of data. For example on telegram he got a few bits of text but no pictures. I have seen this before. This is consistent with a theory I guessed a long time ago: since all “modern peoples’ devices” are constantly reporting back to the Church of Apple / Church of Google / Church of Samsung / etc, the networks have rigged the roaming rules so that tiny bits of data, say a few k per day, are allowed through even if there is no data roaming agreement between your SIM’s network and the one you are roaming on. That policy would also nicely support law enforcement i.e. the device remains tracked in the usual way. And google still gets all the position data on android devices which enables it to collect traffic movement data which they sell to satnav software vendors.
