If you happen to be in the same situation as I was since yesterday, you need to read this.
Three network no longer supports VoLTE or 3G services.
I found this out the hard way, and this is probably how most users will experience it.
Yesterday, I decided to add a Pay As You Go pack from Three UK, with data, on an old phone that I have. It is a Sony Xperia XA2 Ultra, which still works great and is good as a backup phone.
I chose the pack from my account and paid £10 for it.
I got the payment confirmation and thought everything was okay, but it wasn't, as I found out later.
The internet was working fine, and I was able to receive messages from Three with the confirmation, so I had no reason to suspect that calls wouldn’t work.
I found out after many hours of troubleshooting that voice calls require a different network service to function.
In the meantime, I did a manual network reset, which didn’t solve the issue.
I also did a factory reset, which also didn’t solve it.
Then I took the SIM card to a Three shop to replace it, thinking it might be faulty.
It was replaced, but that still didn’t solve the problem.
In the shop, I asked the agent if she could put my SIM card in her phone to test it and it worked. I was able to make a call from her phone using my SIM.
I returned home and spent a few more hours on the issue. Horrible, when all you want is for it to work.
I checked if my phone supports 4G and it does.
I spent about an hour with someone from Three support asking for help.
He didn't know how to help and recommended to take the phone to a service center.
I asked for a refund, since I couldn't use what I had paid for, and he told me he couldn’t issue one because the SIM card was working fine in other phones.
So I ended the call without a solution and turned to ChatGPT for help.
This is how I found out it was actually a problem with my phone, but because of Three, and the fact that neither the staff in the shop nor support could help,
I started to research more.
ChatGPT was very helpful, explaining how Three had dropped support for VoLTE services and that seemed to be the root of my problem.
I had to dial *#*#4636#*#*, tap on "Phone Information" and look for "VoLTE Provisioned" to see whether it was checked or unchecked.
In my case, it was unchecked and disabled, so I couldn't do anything with that toggle.
ChatGPT recommended clicking a button at the bottom of the page labelled "Trigger Operator Provisioning".
I waited 10–30 seconds, restarted the phone, and checked the setting again but it still wasn't enabled.
Because of this unsupported setting from Three, I couldn't make or receive phone calls.
Outgoing calls would end abruptly after a few seconds, and incoming calls would go straight to voicemail.
After many hours of troubleshooting and now knowing the exact cause, I called Three support again from a different phone and explained what I discovered.
This time, the support agent couldn't say that a refund wasn't possible, since the problem clearly originated from Three.
So we spent another 30 minutes discussing options. After reading through a lot of internal documentation, most of which I didn't understand, I asked if he could close my account and issue a refund, since I had already spent far too much time trying to solve this.
I got a positive response. I was told that I will receive a refund within the next 7 days, and my account will be closed.
I couldn't be happier to hear that the issue was resolved. Now I can move on to another network provider, like Lebara, which I am already using on another phone and which works great even on the Sony Xperia.
Three's decision to drop support for VoLTE was probably a step forward in terms of technology or a marketing move to push customers toward buying new devices, but in this case, they lost a customer. And the same may happen to others.
Thank you Three for making me spend 6 hours of my life for a problem that you generated!