After a long history of incidents/accidents, I’ve been using my iPhone 3GS (new bootrom) with regular iOS4 for a couple of days. However, I had to do without any mobile internet – even though my contract was fine and it had been working just fine with 3.1.2.

I’ve pretty much tried every instruction that’s out there which has anything to do with enabling mobile internet. Removing SIM-card, resetting APN (even though my provider doesn’t even need any APN settings), completely resetting network settings – along with disabling+enabling mobile data connections and/+ 3G for a thousand times. The “E” or the “3G” was showing up fine (depending which one I enabled), nevertheless, no connection could be made from any app.

Then I remembered something from previous days: I was using SBsettings along with toggles (one for EDGE, one for 3G), and I usually enabled or disabled both of them at the same time. Enabled them when I needed mobile internet, disabled them in order to save battery. So, depending on whether 3G was available, the bar was showing “3G” or just “E” – however, it was also still showing “E” even when I disabled both 3G and EDGE via toggles. I.e., an “E” was showing, but there was no connection – any app would confirm no connection. Furthermore, if I had EDGE disabled via toggle, I could enable 3G – and get a shiny “3G” – but still no connection possible.

So, the fact that if – in the current state with iOS4 – I disabled mobile data connections and there showing no “E” at all, made me presume that in earlier days my “mobile data connections” was always enabled and I was just switching EDGE and/+ 3G on and off. This could also mean – with remembrance of the “E” always showing in earlier days – that when I enabled mobile data connection now, I could enable 3G all I wanted, there would be no connection if EDGE was disabled (which I couldn’t enable, since I’m on iOS4 without toggles).

On order to prove or test this, I had to find a way to enable EDGE without the availability of a jailbreak and therefore with a lack of toggles. My dear friend Andre (special thx again) had a diff run on his iTunes MobileSync backup – once with EDGE enabled and once with EDGE disabled via toggle. He came to the following result:

In the backup file d67ab43d1c47dd60d7cf3a7a3939775f6938a8ef.mddata (3.x) or 8218978e4ab0a48035bb92653145a6be872ea858 (4.0) you will find the following excerpt (note the “ip1“):

<string>com.apple.CommCenter (ip1)</string>
<key>com.apple.CommCenter</key>
<dict>
<key>AllowNetworkAccess</key>
<integer>1</integer>
<key>Available</key>
<integer>1</integer>

The integer following the Available-node switches between 1 (EDGE toggle on) and 0 (EDGE toggle off). That basically meant, that for enabling EDGE without a toggle, I had to alter this value and get it back into my iPhone.

Simple way to do it:

1. Backup/Sync iPhone
2. Restore iPhone
3. manually edit the above file (depending on your OS version) in the current backup folder
4. Recover iPhone with the backup you created and edited

That’s it – it worked for me. EDGE seems to be enabled, and I can use the OS switches for data connection and 3G as I like, they work, as well, as expected+desired.

Hope this helps.