[Android Central Question]

This is a good one. Suddenly my galaxy s4 stopped receiving and sending calls. I could still receive texts and emails. My wife's Galaxy s5 worked fine. Went to ATT store (my provider), as I walked into store my phone began to work. Went home made one call then my phone quit making and receiving calls again. Next day went back to ATT store (phone working in store) and they told me the gentleman they just serviced had exactly the same problem, the same phone and they told me I should get a new phone. I decided to try a new sim card for $5.00 instead of purchasing a new phone. The new sim card did not work, inside home problems, outside worked fine be it a little slow connecting. So I went to Best Buy bought a new Samsung S3, worked fine until I got home, same thing inside no, outside yes. Now I know it is not the phone, something inside my home is blocking just my number/phone as my wife's (same ATT account) works fine. I shut off all electronics in home still my phone is not receiving or sending calls. My wife calls my phone an it goes to voicemail with my phone on and in my home. Anyone figures this one out has got to a genius.

[Rukbat]

Figuring out where a mobile signal is going, and by what path, and what's interfering with it, is a specialty that can take years of study to begin to understand how difficult it is - let alone how to solve problems. It doesn't take a genius, it takes someone who just happened on a solution, or an alien from a species about 10,000 years more advanced than we are.

(Using Sprint, the entire city I live in is covered like a blanket - except in my niece's house. It's fine on the front step, it's fine on the rear and side deck, it's fine all over the yard, but inside the doorway or further in, zilch - unless I hold the phone against one particular pane of glass in one window on the second floor. It turns out [it took me a few months to figure it out] that the ridge across the street is causing knife-edge refraction of the signal that causes it to skip over the house [and only her house - the signal is fine in her next-door neighbor's house], but something in the woods behind her house [it's state land, so I'm not about to go hunting for it] is reflecting enough signal to that window pane for a phone to work. And it could be something as small as a can lid or even smaller. Even totally rust-covered, so it would be invisible among the fallen leaves. That's the kind of situation you're facing.)

You didn't say what make and model phone your wife has - but as things progress, receivers get more sensitive. The question is how you get texts but not voice - they both go by 3G with AT&T.

Ask your AT&T store where the Device Support Center is and bring the phone to them. It might be intriguing enough that AT&T engineering might want to come out and figure out what's going on. I can understand no voice, no text. Email is data, so it's almost certainly at a different frequency, but text and no voice? That's like not being able to hear certain words, all (the ones you can hear and the ones you can't) spoken by the same person. It can't happen - but it's happening. That's not something that even a genius can figure out. (And I'm no genius. And I doubt that anyone else reading Android Central is.)