iPhone 5 searching – won’t connect to cellular network at all

Last night my iPhone 5 started to lose my connection to AT&T. I am in downtown Pittsburgh on the 9th floor, so I’m in no fringe.. I turned off LTE when it started happening and it would switch to 4G, but that quickly stopped working, too, and it just shows “Searching…” Sometimes now it will show 4 bars for 10 seconds, then 1 bar, then Searching.

I read some discussion about the issue and:

1. activated Airplane mode and deactivated
2. turned off the phone and booted it back up, with no success
3. did a Network Reset (Settings > General > Reset > Network Reset), but that did nothing other than delete all my wifi network passwords.
4. did a hard reset by holding in the sleep and home buttons for a while
5. popped out the SIM card with a paperclip (right side of phone) and pushed it back in
6. swapped the SIM card

Here are some threads with similar issues:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1452223

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1450043

Here’s what it looks like:

CONCLUSION:

After visiting an AT&T store in Cranberry Twp, PA and swapping the SIM card with no change whatsoever, we have concluded that there is a problem with the iPhone 5 connecting to any SIM card. Thanks for the good experience there, Roger.

To check to see if this is your problem go to Settings > General > About and check to see if you have a ICCID line:

My ICCID line will appear if it shows AT&T in the top left, but disappears when it says “Searching..”

(If you have this happen, make sure to show the Apple Store tech as this is the smoking gun.) So, my iPhone 5 can’t read the SIM card. Now the question is whether this is isolated of will show itself like a timebomb. Is it SIMgate??

Next I went to the local Apple Store and Play Store Download Matt did some quick diagnostics and didn’t find any known issue, so he pulled out on the 16 specially-packed non-retail iPhone 5s in stock for this type of situation. He had me backup to iCloud, restore on the new one and off I went. Despite taking some time, AT&T and Apple really took care of this well.

PLEASE COMMENT IF YOU HAVE THIS PROBLEM AND WHETHER REPLACING THE SIM WORKS.

[UPDATE 3/17/13] Here is a site with some good suggestions on what to do if you have this problem. If the ICCID is gone, I suspect replacement is your only cure.