Text messages / phone calls delayed intermittently

I have had intermittent problems with receiving texts and calls since day one of getting my first Android device from AT&T over a year ago. About every few weeks or so, text messages I receive will be delayed by 4+ hours from when the sender sent them until suddenly my phone alerts me to a ton of messages all at the same time. At the same time, I can be alerted to phone mail coming in with no indication that there are any missed calls on my phone, but the caller states the phone rings and rings on their end with no answer. This has occurred with multiple callers/senders using multiple different networks. I have had zero known issues with making calls and sending texts.

Some other symptoms that I have notice occur when this issue occurs (though not all of them every time):

• I’ll randomly get somewhere between 10 and 30 copies of the first text message in the backlog.
• After turning the screen on, my signal indicator will be rapidly changing for about a second.
• The clock on the phone will be behind by a few hours (though not normally as much as when I stopped being notified of texts.

I honestly don’t think it is a network problem. I normally have 3-4 (out of 5) bars at both home and work, the two main places I am. On one of the few times AT&T did (or at least claimed to do) true debugging of my issue and looked at the tower logs corresponding to one of the time this issue occurred on my device, they discovered that the text was sent and accepted by my device at the time the text was sent, and not hours later when my phone told me I got a text. However, since I’ve tried two different Android devices at this time (Samsung Galaxy S II and Samsung Captivate Glide) and they both have the same issue, Samsung claims it must be an AT&T network issue. However, this occurs at multiple locations over 10 miles apart from each other.

Does anyone have any clue what I can do to try and fix this? So far, AT&T and I have tried the following without any luck (after I’ve spoken with them literally 30-40 times in the past year about this):

• Countless times “re-registering” the phone on the network.
• Rebooting the phone.
• Factory reset of phone.
• Different Android versions (Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich)
• 5+ different SIM cards.
• Different phones.

It really sounds like an AT&T problem (although not surprised that they won't admit it). You've done a heck of a lot to eliminate other problems as you've outlined above. I hate to say it, but it's probably time to look into switching providers. Has anyone else in your area with AT&T had the same problems?

I know no one in my area who has AT&T. Probably 75% of the people I know in my area have Verizon, with a few others having a few different random carriers.

Some of the AT&T reps have claimed that there's a known issue with Android (some of them saying it's specific to Samsung devices) where the phone needs to be rebooted every other day or so to allow texts to be received successfully. Samsung of course denies this, and I've found no one online claiming such an issue exists. Has anyone else notice that rebooting every other day is necessary to get texting to work correctly?

I hit this problem again last night. To debug, I actually called my cell phone using Google Voice while the phone was on Standby. From Google, I heard the phone ring multiple times but my cell phone never rang once, and afterwards I was sent to voicemail and so hung up. I then tried again, but this time, after letting the phone ring twice (according to Google Voice), I pulled my cell phone out of Standby. The cell phone instantly started ringing at that point.

Based on this and previous experience, this problem seems to occur only when my phone is in Standby mode (though it obviously doesn't occur every time it is in Standby). As soon as I hit the button on my phone to turn the screen back on and enter in my pin, that's when I start getting the texts and voicemail messages. If I had to guess, when in Standby mode and this problem occurs, the phone is accepting text messages from the AT&T network, but it is not ACKing the messages, and so AT&T keeps trying to send the message again later, which is why I get all those copies of the first message, but doesn't bother sending along any additional texts/calls since the phone is currently not responding to the first one. My phone also doesn't alert me when the first message comes in in Standby mode. Once I pull the phone out of Standby, then the phone starts acking the messages and so AT&T starts sending me the additional messages/voicemail notifications.

This is my best guess as to what is happening at this time base on what I observed, but of course AT&T won't confirm this is a possible scenario. Does this sound like something that Android devices have done in the past to others? Is there any way to fix/prevent this?

This seems to be an AT&T 4G issue. For me the problem began when I upgraded from 3G to 4G. I have coworkers who all have S-II or S-III's those with 4G phones experience this issue but those on 3G don't. I've asked AT&T about it multiple times and I always get the I've never heard that before response.