Moto G6 Play Terrible Cellular Data Reception

I’ll add more details as I get time, but just wanted to quickly share my experiences with the Moto G6 Play. I got the unlocked version and using it on the sprint network was horrible. When outside, it was mostly tolerable, but indoors I was lucky to connect to a website half the time. These are all in areas where my Galaxy S5 had no issues ever.

I spent way too much time troubleshooting and got no where. I was advised to do the network profile reset and the PRL reset which did nothing for my issues. I went to sprint stores and they did resets on the phone with no major benefit.

The issue seemed to be extremely poor upload speeds, which prevented it from loading websites. Speedtests would time out abiut half the time. Once it started downloading, it seemed to get okay speeds indoors and very fast speeds outdoors. The fast speeds were useless if the site never started to load though. The download speeds would be between 2mb/s up to 60mb/s and the upload speeds would frequently be 0.01.  Outside I would typically get 2-3 mb/s uploads and on rare occasions 5-6mb/s. There was almost always a delay before websites would load, though, even outside.

At one point I was advised to try a different sim card, but no store had the proper one in stock. The phone came with a sim card that says sprint on it, so I’d be surprised if a different sim card could fix the issue.

On wifi, the phone worked great.

Researching issues with Motorola phones on Sprint, I found there were some models that had issues relented to IPv6 implementation. There was a guy on the sprint forums would could set your phone line to only access IPv4 and that fixed the issues for other Motorola phones. I tried that and it did seem to help at times, but overall it wasn’t clear to me it did make any difference as I still could not use my phone’s data connection indoors in many places.

I even returned the phone for a replacement and had the exact same issues, so it wasn’t just the one phone. Ultimately, I had to return the phone and go with a different model.

I suspect in the budget Motorola phones they are using either very poor quality antennas, or the particular chipset just doesn’t work well for data reception.

I loved the rest of the phone. It was perfect for me as my vision isn’t good enough to notice the difference between the ultra high resolution screens and the G6 play screen. I loved the fingerprint sensor – it worked extremely fast and effectively unlocked the phone. I loved Android oreo with the picture in picture for Google maps and YouTube. The only other negative was the camera – it was slow to take pictures and the images were decent but nothing special. Because I don’t play games, I had no issues with the speed of the processor or the amount of RAM. I would have easily tolerated the mediocre camera if I had adequate cellular data connections. I’ll be curious to see if this is a problem for anyone else or with this model on other carriers.

Trying to get a new phone from sprint at a decent price on my sero plan was such a nightmare I even switched carriers in the end. That is a post for another time.