Apple mobile radio chips: Reports of trouble with Telekom's 5G+ Gaming
C1 and C1X are in the iPhone 16e and iPhone Air. Telekom customers may have a problem with this, affected users report.
Detail of a mobile radio antenna mast with small 5G cells.
(Image: Lisic/Shutterstock.com)
According to forum reports, Apple's own mobile radio chips are causing connection problems with Deutsche Telekom's network – but only when a specific additional function is active. Affected users report that despite a normal signal strength, no data transfer is possible. The error pattern only occurs with the iPhone 16e and the iPhone Air. The 16e was the first device with Apple's C1 modem, and the Air was the second with the faster C1X. A workaround seems to exist, but it is not always easy to implement.
Actually a useful feature for niche target groups
The reason for the connection disruption is a feature that, until now, has only existed in Germany within the Telekom network: the 5G+ Gaming option. It was activated for Apple phones last year and is also officially released for the iPhone 16e and iPhone Air, but the issues with it seem to be surfacing only now. The technology is designed to reduce latency in mobile games. Thanks to network slicing technology, packet transit times are reduced, which is enabled for individual cloud gaming providers (currently Nvidia Geforce Now and Sora Stream). 5G+ Gaming is a free additional option that one actually has to book, but in some cases it also appears to be automatically active.
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For reasons unknown so far, 5G+ Gaming “clashes” with C1 and C1X. Users were initially unable to find a solution through usual fixes: neither restarting nor reactivating the mobile radio connection (via airplane mode) helped permanently. “Apps, browsers, and services did not load or hung permanently,” even though telephony and reception seemed normal, according to an affected user. In collaboration with Telekom's fault resolution, they finally discovered that 5G+ Gaming had to be deactivated. This is fastest via the service or tariff settings. However, this naturally also means that the feature is lost if you are one of the gamers who use it.
Problem 5G-RedCap on the Apple Watch
A thread in the “Telekom hilft” forum now has almost 90 postings. One user writes that the problem has been known “for a long time.” An employee from the “Telekom hilft” team stated that they are currently working on fixing the error. However, nothing seems to work without deleting the option at the moment. There is a problem with deactivation, though: 5G+ Gaming seems, at least according to the blog iPhone-Ticker.de, to be automatically active for Apple Watch users in the Telekom network.
Apparently, it is related to the new 5G-RedCap technology, which was newly added to Ultra 3, Series 11, and SE3. 5G+ Gaming and 5G-RedCap are controlled together. Previously, the watch still used the LTE network. Now the question arises whether it is possible to deactivate 5G+ Gaming for the iPhone but not for the Watch, so that 5G remains active there. According to users, Telekom does not currently foresee this. We have inquired with the company about this. The article will be updated as soon as a response is received.
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