Got a weird situation. I bought A54 phone in some country A. Inserted two sims: from the same country A as well as from a country B. Was traveling to different places, never was bothered by anything, never paid attention to regions. Even did not knew this subtlety well.
After 6 months of a normal use and travel to really many countries and regions a region lock has appeared! What I learned then is that my phone has a macroregion OLM and a CSC code XME - Malaysia. This does nothing with the county A where I bought my phone. Neither with country B, which sim I also use. Ok, fine, it was sold perhaps illegally. Still, I have several questions:
Why it was working fine for a while, why never showed any strange behavior, was updated normally, etc?
Why this region lock popped up?
Any logic behind when to expect this again, what can trigger it?
I mean, in general, it is disturbing. Completely unreliable. Would it happen right after the sell I would perhaps give it back, claim a refund and that's it. However, it has happened 6 months! after.
It was resolved: apparently the phone disliked a sim from country A. However, when this card was in, the other one did not work either. In the meantime, a sim from country B alone could work (which was non-trivial to guess initially). After making a phone call using B sim for 5 minutes hoping this will calm down the phone - it indeed has calmed it down! And now both sims work fine again.
Strangely, during this operation B was in roaming, neither it is from Malaysia, nor it is from the OLM macroregion.
I'm not sure I understand your comment. I do not know what is MY area. Area where I bought the phone? Area of the CSC code? Area of sim cards I use? I travel roughly once a month around the globe and wherever profitable I try to buy local sim cards. For the moment I point out that Samsung's policy of regions is weird and maybe buggy. That means for an end user - unreliable. Even though I like Samsung's hardware.
I'm glad it worked out. Whether your phone works in a specific area is really up to your service provider and their sim. I figure it was an glitch with your service provider that got resolved.
