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Major Problems with Cingular Network
Wabin writes "It looks like the Cingular GSM network is having serious trouble. My phone stopped working today completely, though my wife's was still able to make outgoing calls. Talking to tech support, they claimed some kind of massive failure across the country starting around 4PM yesterday and possibly a virus attack. Howard Forums is all abuzz, but there really doesn't seem to be any hard info. Glad I haven't totally given up the land line yet... redundancy is good."
Congular rolled over !
First power networks, now cell phone networks...PATCH YOUR WINDOWS!
Nope. Guess not :(
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Or did you just blindly post?! Sheesh. The first was bad enough. Now how many of these "Can you hear me now?" posts am I going to have to suffer thru?
It's a shock... I mean, the fact that the quality's bad. Really, a company that spends a great deal of money on advertising producing a poor product?
I heard several people today complaining that their phones weren't working, and I can only assume that they, too, were using Cingular. None of them had any idea what was wrong, either.
Perhaps "Cingular" refers to their redundancy plan?
Help, Pol...............has a gu............ill us all ........... address is 3 ..........Street....
It seems to be working okay here in Olympia, WA and it was working today in Seattle when I was up there. But maybe it wasn't, maybe thats why I haven't been getting any phone calls... But I did get some this evening... Anyone with troubles in the Seattle Area?
i thought my bill was just overdue, LOL.
I've been having problems since yesterday.
The REAL question should be will they credit us for the downtime?
Argh, sorry, must post to kill mod points that I assigned.. I didn't realize this was a redundant post.
— darco
...for added redundancy?
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
I'm pretty sure that by law when phone service goes down (land line) you can get a refund for those times. I assume cell is the same? Watch your bill and be sure to get that $3 back.
According to several on the linked forums page, it's already back up and running. According to Shatular customer service, it was a 'power event' that took out large chunks of the nation. "We don't need no stinkin' UPS's"
Winders XP???
It was the first post of the joke. Mod this one up, mod everyone else who repeats it down.
I got this hot chick's phone number, and she told me she has nothing to do on Saturday night, and she is bored, and she was going to go try on all her bikini suits to see what fits her this year. I am supposed to call her and come over to her place, I don't even know where she lives.
And the phone number she gave me is apparently on Cingular network.
The Cubs win their division and make the playoffs, leading to cell phone outages in the US, power outages all over Italy, and more hurricanes are coming. Better get ready for the rapture!
Lousy minor setbacks! This world sucks! -- Homer Simpson
Welchia took out my entire division wear I work ~about 1500 users. The firewalls were doing a good job of blocking the viruses until one of the upper management decided to take their laptop home and plug it into an open internet connection and get infected with it. After the returned to work it spread across the unpatched systems and caused so much network traffic that everything was down for days (some areas didn't have IT on sight to clean up the problems). Really makes you think just how vunerable you are to these.
I guess it is time to go back to smoke signals...
I noticed similar problems with the AT&T GSM network last week. And the week before. And for about six months, continuously, before that. I couldn't receive calls pretty much anywhere, and couldn't place calls anywhere. The problem stopped abruptly last week, but I believe it may have been coincedental to my signing up with Verizon, and swapping my Motorola GSM phone for an LG whatever-verizon-uses-that-isn't-GSM-phone.
If you live in the US, avoid GSM like the plague. Especially in Southern California. I was effectively unreachable when I had GSM. Now that I'm back to traditional service, I can almost see dropping the land line.
And of course, to make matters worse, my Motorola T720 would only try for so long to sign back on to the netowrk when it went out of range. After that it just stops, displays "Unregistered SIM", and is effecitvely shut off. So if you're out of range for 30 minutes, you're out of range all day!
</rant>
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Netcraft says they've just (today) changed their hosting from SBC to BellSouth, both on Solaris. That could just be the web server, though.
Do it NOW before I shit on your pillow.
Yeah...apparently the problem started in Atlanta. Something went out there, and it switched over to a backup in Chicago, and I guess it couldn't handle the extra traffic so there was a cascading failure? Wait a minute, this sounds familiar... This is only on Cingular's GSM, not their TDMA. Those with TDMA and GAIT phones are able to use the service normally. Also, it seems like its only around mid america to the east coast.
[Wavy lines back to the management meeting long long ago.]
Marketroid 1: We need to come up with a name for our company.
Marketroid 2: Yeah, and it needs to be snazzy... catchy... possibly spelled wrong.
Geek (sweating heavily): Big problem. We can't go live yet, our network has way too many singular points of failure. (A geek with poor grammar, who knew?)
Marketroid 1: That's awesome! Singular it is!
Marketroid 2: Or Cingular.
Marketroid 1: Genious. There's a new BMW for both of us for this one...
[wavy lines forward to present day.]
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
Author has a bad attitude and is in need of some of Slashdot-style discipline. Mods, do your work.
I'm still without a connection, and when people call my number, they don't even get my voicemail... just a fast busy signal.
Damn you Cingular! I'm switching providers! Wait, I'm locked into a two year contract :-/ I knew that was a bad idea.
My Cingular (Chicago-area) phone quit receiving calls 10 days ago. After 3 days of their horrible tech support, I finally found a rep who said that their system had no record of my SIM card, and that the records must have "gotten lost." He re-entered them, and all was well for two days, and then the problem recurred. This time, I was told that it was a national problem that had occurred a couple of days earlier. During all of this, I've called *611 dozens of times, and the hold times are well above average. I used to work in one of Cingular's Call Center IT departments; I just emailed a friend who's still there to see what's going on...
Skynet has become self aware
This is why land lines are a MUST when you want to get back out of the Matrix.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Errrrr I mean )(/"%*!)( NO CARRIER !
No carrier jokes never die. They only go offline for a while.
You know, that ominous sounding message is actually:
Help, Polly - your receipe for turkey goulash has a gummy taste to it. Can I double the ingrediants so it will fill us all up? Oops, I've got to go, Bill is complaining that the computer's printer port's address is 3bc and I have to show him how to change it. Oh and you were right, Robert Ulrich played Jim Street in the original "SWAT" TV Show. Goodbye
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
You know it's probably not got anything to do with viruses or worms.
It's more likely human error.
You know this is why everyone down the chain needs to start taking responsability.
Is Microsoft responsable? Yes (not legally I know)
But so is the Syadmin and the utility that hired him.
Quite frankly the utility should also be held responsable for agreeing to hold Microsoft blameless with out anyway of fixing it themselfs.
(I had to add the qualifier becouse with Linux you CAN fix it... With Windows your stuck at Microsofts whims)
But you know Microsoft should be held blameless for the worms now becouse Microsoft has offered patches.
Also they could just blame viruses and worms when what really happend is they did something really stupid and won't admit it.
Baby bell employees ripping digital network hardware out becouse the trainning they have is obsolte and similare stunts...
ISPs were suing baby bells for refusing to bring in more phone lines or knocking lines out after install or ripping out T1-OCR3 hardware...
Now we have power companys who could be hit and a celulare company who is at the very least using it as an excuse for a major outage.
I'm gona start asking cell companys if they run Windows before I sign up. I don't care if they do have a good anti-virus/worm/security policy and armor systems 100% there is still the opratunity to blame human error on malware and not take responsability for major outages.
I don't actually exist.
A nice cup of shut the fuck up, you dumbasses. Trolling is only okay if you know what you are trolling about.
Karma: Good, or bust!
1. Sign up loads of subscribers to a no-out plan. 2. Don't provide any service, but pretend it's an accident. 3. PROFIT!!
why is it that i can go to the middle of nowhere in europe (scandinavia more precisely) with my t-mobile phone and get excellent coverage and from my apartment in NYC, I generally have to count on my landline? Going skiing in Vermont? Sprint is fine; T-mobile is a string-phone. During the black-out I saw tons of people using their cells, but the t-mobile net was down. Same during 9/11. If Deutsche Telecom can get it right in Germany, then why not in the US? Could it be, americans generally settle for less than europeans, cellphonewise? It's not like it's cheaper in the US, au contraire. So, if it's cell-based in the US, at least get it right within the cells!
Sorry, had to vent, but this really puzzles me.
I think that it is funny that Cingular was the first company to purchase 3G compatible network equipment, and yet they have yet to implement that function nor can they sustain a voice-only network. What is the delay? I guess their logo - the little orange guy with his arms raised - is raising them in a shrug of frustration. :)
Nope, their contract probably has a "Acts of God" clause. Of course, I'd like to see how they apply it to windows. That hardly strikes me as a "Act of God".
Dependable, Reliable Furnishings
rely on cell phones and credit cards for survival.
This presents a "cingular" oppurtunity to thousands of customers...To change their service.
Dependable, Reliable Furnishings
Go Sprint. Go Sprint. Go sprint and your black trench coat (the kind that comes strait from columbine high).
snowulf.com
I wouldn't normally pick on you, but two in a row, I can't resist.
You mean where I work. You wear clothes.
You mean on site. A site is a place. Sight is one of the five human senses.
Our group worked for the last 2 days trying to find out why 1 market was down, (cough) chicago (cough), everything looked correct, no errors on our side.
Finally (after 20 hours) we traced it down to Cingulars HLR. Just imagine some mobiles that couldnt connect to Cingulars HLR, they report problems to the roamers network nodes, and roamer network nodes alarm and throttle connections. All the sudden, Cingulars HLR now causes outages on other roaming partner telcos. Nice domino effect.
Right now, the push is to get the hardware up and running, security and availability is the next step. And trust me, the monkeys running the show are busy as hell with duct tape and bailing wire, trying to keep the network running.
As a matter of fact, about thirty seconds after loading this story I got a call on my Cingular GSM phone from one of my friends who also has a Cingular GSM phone.
In Soviet Russia, the phone network knocks out you!
wow! i just switched to t-mobile from cingular two days ago... what luck! if this was some type of attack, then they sure as hell deserve. They never gave me rollover minutes, and charged my a lot for a bit of roaming. They got what they deserved!!! Burn, Cingular!!!!! (this is not meant to be flamebait... well actually, i don't know)
Investing forum
There is an interesting story in the Atlanta Business Chronicle about Cingular getting hit with a $12M fine in California for the poor way that they ran their network and treated their customers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
... And while some have shown skepticism of the usefulness or even safety of the massive networking project, voices at the Pentagon are enthusiastic. "This will be the end of networking issues as we know it. EVeryhting will be different after tomorrow."
redundancy is good.
So does that mean you will be picking up a mistress in addition to your wife?
Is fine in Middle Tennessee, for the moment.
Of course, the phone isn't GSM exclusively in this area. My phone does GSM and one other (TDMA?) and if the GSM is failing I assume either the phone is still working in the other band, or the GSM in this area is (luckily) not down (yet).
Oh well, not that I care. If someone can't reach me online, they're probably not someone I care to speak to.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Some post earlyer about TCP/IP over Bongo Drumbs?
Expermenting with VOIP is good and all but...
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Goddamn those wristbands...
Well, the information I've gotten out of /. in the first few posts has been that (apparently) this started 10 days ago in Atlanta. It (apparently) could be a virus imported from a laptop at home, as such a thing has happened before. And (apparently) the network is back up, and has never been down in certain areas. Other than that it's a whole lot of "5 funny"s, or to be precise:
Funny +4 Overrated -1
Funny +1 Underrated +1
unmoded (attempted joke)
Funny +4 Redundant -0.5 Overrated -0.5
unmoded (in Soviet Russia)
Troll +1 Funny +1
unmoded (on topic discussion, but nothing too special)
Funny +5
Unmoded (on topic, but general observaion)
Underrated +1 (on topic)
Funny +2
Informative +1 (Defintiely a good post; most interesting thing added)
unmoded (seems like joke, though some info in there)
Funny +4
Unmoded (Informative too; possible refunds).
Interesting +1 (Already back up, hmm)
Overrated -1 (don't get the joke myself)
Funny +4 (and it is. This post rocks)
Interesting +1 (good potential explanation)
Funny +1 Underrated +1
Informative +1
Insightful +1 (and good info if it's true)
Funny +5
Informative +1
Informative +2
Funny +1
Funny +3
unmoded (and I'm not sure what it's supposed to be)
Troll -1 Interesting +1
unmoded (and it's insightful too)
unmoded (and this is funny)
unmoded (would be funny, but reference to Columbine is in bad taste)
Funny +1 (huh?)
unmoded (and just a reply)
unmoded (attempt at funny)
Guess there's not much to be said about this, so people just make jokes. Though, the informative topics deserve more priority so that I can pick them out of the crowd. Time to change my settings I guess.
redundancy is good
Redundancy is good.
Cingular GSM in northern New Jersey (newark area) was down the last 2 weeks, It came back into service this Friday though.
What are the chances of us Cingular customers getting reimursed for any of this down time ?? At 0.49 / minute, they owe me about $40 for the weekend...
At first I thought it was the phone, as it started to drop calls, not ring when people called, and then it started to automatically turn itself off. I went in to the the store owned by Cingluar, I was there for 5 minutes and I had a new handset. This was about the middle of August. Now, this handset is having the same problems and my Fiance's phone has had nothing but problems too. (Her's sets off alarm clocks and electronic devices).
I live and die by my Cell phone as I use it as my Only phone, business and personal because I am a consultant and often out to visit with clients on a daily basis and perfer to work from coffee shops when ever possible, and to have people call and the phone not even ring has cost me in terms of business and just generally annoying.
So I finally we both get fed up, so both my Fiance and I walk into store and politely complain about the handsets, and the rep camly states that "They have been having issues with their network and voice mail". I explain, that since this is my one and only phone and I use it for business purposes that I cannot afford to have this type of service and wanted to know about switching handsets. Well, we "couldn't trade in our handsets" and would cost us retail, about $250 - 300 depending on what model, to trade buy something else.
Then I asked him, "How much is it to terminate the agreement?" and he responded studdering $150. And I then replied, "So it would be cheaper for us to break the contract and go to Alltel, then?" and he responded with silence for a few seconds then answered "yes" and then explained that it was problems with the network, not the phones.
I then asked him, "Look at it from my perpective. I am a consulant and if someone can't reach me, I loose money. Even a small contract usually totals several thousand dollars." And then I got the "any time with new technology, system, there is going to be problems" and I said, "This isn't a new system. Europe has been using it for quite sometime. In fact I used it when I was there working/studing abroad this time last year and it was great, I had no problems, so why are you? Why are you requiring all customers trade up for new phones that don't work?" He didn't have an answer.
My Fiance and I then went to AT&T, which isn't much better from what I have heard and way more expensive, and Alltel, which is pretty close to that of Cingular as far as price goes (about $5 difference a month) and for my Fiance is actully a tad bit cheaper.
That was Thursday and I didn't want to make a judgement based on emotion, because I ticked at the rep that gave me the run around on why the network isn't working even though its not his fault, and looked at the fact of the time it would take to call all of my clients and tell them I have a new number and the fact it would cost me about $8.50 more a month with Altell and decided to stick it out for a bit, but things have only been getting worse.
My fiance tried to call me 4 times today, only 1 got through and i continue to drop calls left and right. Before, I rarely had dropped calls unless I was in the middle of the sticks, now I get them all the time.
Bottom line, after reading that this is not just a local problem and speaking with several other providers in the area, that Monday morning my fiance and I are going to go back to the Cingular dealer and break our contract. Yeah its going to cost us $300, but both of us use it for business (she's a wedding planner) and losing just one customer for either of us will be an oppertunity cost of way more than $150. At the very least I go get to expense the cost off my taxes as a business expense so, I guess I break even on paper.
The only thing that sucks, is I just had a new set of business cards printed...always my damn luck...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
After calling Cingular this afternoon to find out the problem with incoming calls, I have been credited with $20 as compensation for the poor service for the last 2 days.
;-)
I can still make outgoing calls but no-one can get hold of me. Shame
I'm on a whisky diet. I've lost three days already.
However, even if Cingular's network was taken down by a virus, that still demonstrates incompetence on their part.
Their roll over plan does work!
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
Terrorists have cut the string that attached the two soup cans together.
"Can you hear me YET?"
+5 funny.
Please do not worry anyone,
Sky*NET will be online in few hours,
it will scan the internet, phone networks,
military networks and get rid of any virus/trojan.
Hopefully, this BETA version of this AI software
ain't broken and won't spread like a trojan horse into all connected computers to turn them into
slave machines to rule out the world of those stupid humans who are completely useless anyway.
-- Terminator 3... The end.
Yet another reason to keep the AMPS (old analogue cell network) online. Yes, it's not used all that often, but it's the network in place for countless emergency and periodic industrial applications (OnStar, for example) and it's a backup that is supported on nearly every phone out there. (did you buy a single-mode phone?)
Yes, it's a price and spectrum hog, but it should be there as a backup. The cell companies should not be allowed to have backup systems for something as vital as cellular communication.
-twb
You mean like this?
Everytime they fsck up, it's a virus. Convenient excuse, isn't it? After all, every average Joe by now has had encounters with virii.
Of course one might say that virii are almost extinct nowadays and that what the average Joe thinks is a virus is really a worm, but oh well...
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
The redundancy is already there in the form of his right arm (its always good to fall back to traditional, more mechanical and reliable machinery occasionally).
You have far, far too much freetime on your hands. And if you're going to reply to this saying you can't find a job, I have some code monkey work for you.
They don't call it Crapular for nothing....
Allways have been. Motorola never invested in the GSM and it shows. That is why Nokia beat the crap out of them.
No.. Skynet is starting to take over the world!
...SBC had just called me today with a telemarketing schlep asking me about switching to Cingular and getting a 'good deal' because I am a 'valued SBC customer'..... I said 'no'. I am now even more glad that I did. My brother had already had endless problems with Cingular.
It is times like these that I am glad that I live in Europe and have yet to purchase a cell phone (one of the .0001% of Swedes who do not have a cell phone).
It looks like Patinder and Jatinder's code fixes (wow, it's AMAZING how cheap these guys are! Lay off some more USian workers!) somehow crashed the system.
Listen, I've put some calls in to the Jajau Hair Oil Factory and Computer Programming Company - but Bangalore's in a different time zone, they'll still be asleep!
Oh I dunno, tell the tech support in Delhi to tell customers something. Anything. We have obscene CEO pay and stock options to inflate!
...actually happened at a company I worked at once.
We sold transcripts of TV shows, including the old "Phil Donahue" shows in the early '90s. There was a lady on the show who called herself "The Recipe Detective." She had a column in a small-town newspaper which was pretty popular there. She took famous foods and tried to figure out how they were made: Twinkies, Oreos, Kentucky Fried Chicken, things like that. Then she published her recipes so you could make them yourself. Donahue thought this would be popular on his show.
Oh, boy, and howdy.
The Recipe Detective made the same offer on the show that she did in her newspaper column: "Send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and I'll send you whichever recipe you want." This turned out to be the biggest mistake of her life. She got over a million replies. Just sending the envelopes back with an apology would have bankrupted her. So, the next time she was on the show she apologized to all the nice people who had written her and told them they could get the recipes and transcript by calling our company. And she gave our 800 number and address.
Thirty seconds later our phones began to ring.
We had two T-1s for our phone lines because the calls tended to come in spikes right after our number appeared on national television. (And you thought Voice Over Internet Protocol was a new thing.) The T-1s were maxed out within five seconds and stayed that way for a week. It turned out that not only had our own lines been overloaded, but our long-distance provider's cross-country fiber-optic lines had not had the capacity to carry that many calls. (Not that it mattered to our customers. A busy signal is a busy signal.)
Even the post office was slashdotted: The trays of mail (boy, did our delivery guy hate us!) filled up all the halls on one floor of our building.
We switched to MCI because they had special ways of dealing with these kinds of problems: They could put our overflow into a voice-mail service on which customers could leave a call-back number. If their cross-country capacity was exceeded they could take the calls in the every local region and store them in voice-mail there.
When Donahue reran the second Recipe Detective show, he gave us a heads-up it was coming. So we told MCI it was on its way. And we had extra people ready for the onslaught. It happened again, but we had all the special procedures in place. After 24 hours MCI called (we had set up a special line so they could get through). It seems their hard drives were almost full and could we please start listening to and removing our voice-mail messages? Well, not very easily since all our lines were still jammed with incoming calls (and MCI's voice-mail system was accessed by phone). So we hired people to work out of their own homes to listen to the voice-mail messages and compile gigantic lists of call-back numbers.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Remind me again how do you get a virus on a mobile network? Ive heard of text-message virii that can go around phones but thats just stupid, what idiot cant design a phone that cant handle a 160 byte plain-text message securly? buffer overflow my ass. If on the other hand they mean a virus thats affecting their actual computers that control the network then thats just as stupid unless they mean some disgruntled tech whos planted it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
GSM in the USA aint very good is it? Here in England, I have been on Vodafone for 4 years, and the biggest outage was 1 day when a flood killed a main Microwave relay station... Vodafone rulez, O2, Orange and T-Mobile suck. Big time.
Just for curiosity, i did crosscheck prices with other GSM providers in Europe (more specifically KPN-mobile in Holland). Also i'm under the impression that most things in England tend to be more expensive than in mainland Europe.
I found out as follows:
[KPN-mobile Holland]
Hi 30
30 EUR = $34.44 USD
Don't pay for incoming calls
200h or SMS's at Peak or non-peak (calls or sms's beyond the free minutes cost 0.22 EUR = $0.25 USD per-minute/per-sms)
GPRS 1Mb bundle - 10 EUR = $11.48 USD
No Long-Distance in Holland (ie all calls are local)
No Roaming in Holland, 0.59 EUR = $0.67 USD in rest of Europe
Notes:
- There are other plans available, from Hi 20 to Hi 80.
- Prices are per-minute but calls charges are determined per-second after the 1st minute (ie a 1m23s call will cost you 1 + 23/60 minutes).
- Roaming in Europe prices are per minute for calls within the country (peak or non-peak). Only checked France and Britain, prices might be different in other countries in Europe. For roaming calls you can choose your local provider, i only listed the cheapest prices found.
The conclusions are still very much the ones of RzUpAnmsCwrds, even if not quite so outrageously.
However, all over Europe prepaid plans are available. This means no monthly charges, no free minutes and more expensive per-minute/per-sms costs. On the other hand, receiving calls is still free.
For those that mostly receive calls (and make few calls from the mobile), this turns out to be incredibly cheap (still, the calling side pays mobile charges even if from a fixed phone).
It's not by chance that in Western Europe, 1998, prepaid subscribers represented 37% of all subscribers (check here). The forecast (found in the same place) forsees that by 2008 about half of all mobile phone subscribesr will be prepaid.
Skynet is becoming active!
Didn't get off on pumping the cat last night, ehh?
Have one thanks! :-)
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
That's why it's good to have KDE & Gnome... ... and XFCE, which is what I'm using now... ... and XPDE (yuck!), and... well, check it at www.xwinman.org
PS1: if you got Opera, mark the link and click with the middle-button in the tab bar, outside a tab
PS2: if you have a 2-button mouse, press ctrl-shift and click the same way, this time with the left button
KISS MY ASS, CINGULAR!
This company is being mis-managed into the ground. They're so bad that I'm half-afraid to sign up with Verizon (which is very good around here) for fear that I will be part of a herd that overwhelms their network and end up in the same straits.
Avoid Cingular.
Consider how big a flap this outage is causing. Consider how many people feel their whole life has been turned upside down.
Now, ask yourself how many of those people's lives REALLY have been turned upside down.
For a small set of the population, having mobile communications is critical. But that set is MUCH smaller than the set of people who THINK mobile communications are critical. Folks, there are answering machines with remote playback and pay telephones. There is even the idea of WAITING - that this conversation can take place LATER.
I was on a business trip a while back. I was asked by one of our Marketing directors what my cell number was. "I don't have a cell." He was shocked. "I don't need one. When I am not traveling, I can make all the personal calls I want on the local autopatches. Business calls can damn well wait till I am in the office. When I am travelling on vacation, the only calls I need to make are to hotels to book a room, and those are toll free and I can use a payphone at a gas station. When I am traveling on business the company can damn well loan a phone to me."
I'm not a Luddite - quite the contrary, I help design test equipment for cell phone. I know too well what the systems look like. That is one of the reasons I don't have a phone.
For $DEITY's sake folks, unplug once in a while - you will find out that you live quite well without the phone!
www.eFax.com are spammers
The theory I've seen kicked around here a couple times (and on the Howard Chui forums) was that it was a power outage.
How exactly does a power outage spread nationwide? (I'm not talking about the recent nationwide power outage we blamed on Canada. It seems that only Cingular had this 'nationwide power outage.) How do they accomplish this?
Am I overlooking something, or does it not make any sense that they'd go down nationwide due to 'power problems?'
________________________________________________
suwain_2
now that's redundancy.... A Wife & Mistress is like a hard drive with cdr backups, ones solid, the other is sleek and shiny.. I prefer raid 0,
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I had Sprint PCS for 2 years, reception was terrible. I would be sitting in my apt talking, in the middle of Downtown Chicago and it would just drop. Called customer service to complain and argued with them about the poor service for 45 minutes...after that the poor woman said: "Can you call me back in a landline? I can't hear what you're saying." That got me out of the contract without paying the termination fee.
Now I've got T-mobile...it rocks.
If "negativity" is "your fault!", then who's taking credit for the positive things that happen?
Here's my take:
Cingular uses an LDAP database for phone authentication. When you fire your phone up, it will auth against their directory.
They were in the process of updating these LDAP systems to use OpenWave's directory server. A master and a slave system in Atlanta, and a slave system in Chicago.
Looks as though Atlanta LDAP's failed, and Chicago couldn't handle the load. This would also explain why they told those of us calling support not to restart our phones.
That's what you get for using OpenWave, I guess!
This guy says he may loose thousands of dollars from missing a few calls, and then complains that the competition will cost him $8.50 more per month??? Funny how the mind works when you're so mad ;-)
Here is Switzerland just out of curiosity, I checked the prices on the biggest company, Swisscom, and found the following for the most expensive package (International): .040/minute
Monthly charge CHF 45
GPRS CHF 0.19 / 10 kB (unlimited)
Normal hours: CHF
Low hours: CHF 0.30/minute
Night/Weekends CHF 0.20/minute
GSM Roaming
HSCSD (Data at 56kbps)
Voicemail
SMS (and MMS)
Conferencing
Call waiting
This is expensive for calling but it's very reliable (I've used my phone in Germany, South Africa, Australia, France and Holland with no problems)
GSM is simply the best in international terms. Very few countries use CDMA whether it's better or not and that number (apart from Iraq) is dropping. I expect that in the US most will eventually switch over to GSM eventually.
That wouldnt even come close to working. I havent seen Cingulars contracts, but I can garuntee you there is a provision in there that states that service isnt guarenteed. Its the nature of cellular service, you will not get service 24/7. This looks to be a large problem effecting lots of people however the contract you have between them and you is between them and you the lots of other people are irelavent. You should check on getting credits for the outage, if you cant use your phone theres no reason to pay for that portion of service.
I know this is slightly off topic, but I figure I have a decent chance of actually getting this read by someone who knows something about cell phones and how the base stations are programmed. So here goes..
I've noticed that when I'm on the phone for more than about 5-10 minutes the probability that I get dropped goes up dramatically (AT&T phone in the Boston area). Even if I don't get dropped, the quality of the link drops, with lots of hash and breakups. After I get dropped, if I immediately call again, the call comes through clear as a bell. That sort of thing has happened at least a dozen times in the last week. I'm not driving or walking when this happens, so it's not a question of getting closer to an antenna.
Do the base stations have a priority listing where they will drop old calls to accept new ones?
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
My Cingular service has been crap for years! Nothing new here.
You can say THAT again!
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
I really don't know what caused Cingular networks problems but I HAVE noticed an increase in blaming problems on viruses. Maybe there really is a connection but it seems odd. Our company switched all of our data over to Sprint recently and within a week we had major packet loss. Sprints answer was the Blaster virus. Well for the past month we have had the same sporadic packet loss and I really doubt the Blaster virus is the root cause. Recently they moved us over to "a different blade" to try to resolve one of the outages. Sounds like people are very quick to jump on the virus bandwagon. Veritas seems to be taking the same road. Their first step for any troubleshooting always seems to you reboot everything. Then they move on to the potential virus thing. I take it with a grain of salt, maybe it is, maybe not but seems like an excuse.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
"Oh by the way... You're welcome!"
...welcome our new Cubbie overlords.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I gave up my landline 4 years ago. I never talked on the phone much anyway. My internet is via broadband. My Cingular cell-phone sits on a table and pretends it is a landline. My parents live in Florida and I live in Indiana. My father (59 years old) had a stroke and since I do not chat on the phone much I had no idea it was down. It took my family 8.5 hours to track me down via other means. Thanks Cingular. Or thanks Mr. Hacker if that turns out to be the case.
FWIW:
:)
I didn't like Cingular's policies regarding calling plan features and pricing when I was looking at a new carrier a couple years ago.
I ended up with Voicestream (T-Mobile). They not only had the simplest pricing plans (no roaming charges within the U.S.) and only $10 (at the time, I think it's $20 now for new contracts) to add an additional phone to the family plan.
Verizon at the time, and still today, can't offer anything near it in the realm of price/features. Their customer support (my girlfriend has Verizon, and I've been there when we've talked to their representatives and tech support).
AT&T wireless doesn't have any service in the upstate NY area unfortunately, but they also have some limitations. They allegedly locked their T610s to prevent downloading MIDIs except from their $1 a download portal? And MMS mesages are $.35 whereas they only cost the data transferred with T-Mobile ($3.99 for 1MB, $9.99 unlimited--$19.99 for unlimited, unrestricted [non-wap-proxied] Internet).
With that said, my *1yr* contract with them is up (they seem to be the only carrier still using 1 year contracts) and I have an unlocked phone. If they ever do something that I don't like, I'll be looking for a new carrier (especially after November and portable numbers
Curious that Google /. report!
News has NOTHING
on this besides the
Neo: "Operator, I need a hard line!"
*unexpected click*
Neo: "Damn!"
Cell phones are supposed to do AT LEAST what POTS did and THEN you add value. The sad truth is that too much of the time they're not even giving us a decent connected call like plain old copper. If the phone on your wall did this poorly, you'd yank it out and go back to hollering.
I had t-mobile (voicestream or whatever it used to be called) and it was crap. Put up with it for a year and a half, and it never got any bettter. And this was in the northeast, it's most saturated area.
Had dual mode Cingular, and it was good. And it had email from phone to phone as well.
Recently combined my wife's and my plans to the Cingular GSM system. And the free phone is a Siemens. Both are crap. Apparently SMS only (unless I can't read a manual). the Siemens phone is as anti-intuitive a piece of electronics as I have ever seen - slow - everything is stored on the sim card by default, and apparently it's a 110 baud transfer - actually getting to a menu or retrieving a number to dial takes a dog's age compared to other sims phones I've had.
Voice messaging is taking up to 1.5 days and often hours to register a voice message on a phone (yes - in range and turned on).
Cingular has no explanation for the strange series of beeps and boops the line makes when attempting to complete a call - they even say I need to call Siemens.
And yes, we're upset - because in the case of an emergency or work, the phone can be mission critical or life threatening. I once sat broken down in a hole in the Voicestream coverage on the Mass Pike for nearly two hours in the middle of the night. Yes, I would have been in the same situation without a cell phone - but the point is they claim convenience and service and safety (then make the fine print say don't ever count on us).
My wife misssed a major piece of work because the messages are taking hours, and she's not happy.
Two worst takeovers in New England history: Fleet taking over (your bank's name here) and SBC taking over SNET. (Dan Duquette is gone, so no use naming the third, but Jan 26, 2004 can't come fast enough - he still gets paid til then). Both have gone south on a rocket sled since - SNET were local folk who knew what was going on and knew who could solve a problem.
Their system has screwed the pooch, and we don't care how hard it is to fix - it's not our problem. It's theirs, and they need to get it done.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
the contract you have between them and you is between them and you; the lots of other people are irrelevant.
Two words: Class Action.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I just thought people didn't want to give me my dealer's room badge back...
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
...internal host/network security and perimeter security. Firewalls won't help when you walk a virus into the office and plug it into your internal network, but they'll certainly help give you time to upgrade e.g. ssh on all your internal systems without nearly as much chance of suffering a successful attack from the outside.
On the other hand, automated corporate desktop patch updates and virus signature updates should help mitigate the "laptop" sort of issues.
I had a VoiceStream / Nokia GSM phone in the NYC area in 2000-2002 and I had much better reception than my friends on other CDMA/TDMA networks. Generally every city I had to go to (San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Charleston SC, Detroit) worked fine with GSM, though I found I would have no reception in smaller cities in states like Virginia. I was quite content with GSM.
I moved to Toronto in 2002 and have a Rogers AT&T Wireless GSM phone (a BlackBerry 5810). Toronto reception for GSM is OK, but GPRS reception tends to suck (making the BlackBerry difficult to use - it sometimes takes upwards of 10 minutes to negotiate a GPRS signal vs. the "always-on" Mobitex signal of prior models).
Now besides the reception being awful for GPRS everywhere, I find the AT&T GSM network is somewhat dodgy at times when I travel: I found myself having to roam onto the VoiceStream network in NYC quite a bit. In Seattle, the AT&T network was barely reachable, and in San Francisco, same thing (Cingular's was reachable though).
There were entire days in San Francisco this past June where I couldn't get *any* GSM signal from any network, AT&T OR Cingular, even when I did a network scan. I've heard similar complaints from other GSM users.
So I'm not sure what the problem is... I know the BlackBerry 5810 isn't the best GSM phone, but I've heard of problems with 6710's and the new "blueberrys". I'm not sure about the Sony/Ericssons. Are all the recent models of GSM phones just crap? Or has the recent upsurge in GSM network investment created a bunch of technical problems?
-Stu
Using a GAIT phone (Nokia 6340i) I just powered it on, I get antennae bars (albeit with a noticeable lag after start up) and it receives calls like a charm. This is in the Washington D.C. metro area.
(it better work! I just signed another 2 year contract on Wednesday!)
Anyone else care to report?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Wowbagger wrote: ``I can make all the personal calls I want on the local autopatches`
:-)
Well, gosh, we don't all carry HTs (several times bigger than most cell phones) or have 2m/440 radios mounted under the dashboards in our cards.
And you're not really unplugged when you have a ham radio with you, now, are you?
Rusty / n6gqi (who much prefers a cell phone to a crowded ham repeater)
So you think the tech should have been all reasonable and explained things real nice for the umpteenth time so as not to ruffle any feathers or give geeks a bad name? This geeks job is protecting a network which is probably the business and some dipshit who can't read policy or remember it or thinks that he, she, it is smarter than safety procedures, threatens to bring the whole house of cards down, leaving the geek the blame is not cause for some geek to get a little territorial. Fuck That! How many fucking retards an hour is this geek supposed to handle and still function in the job?
I'm a Hired Gun Geek who gets called into totally out of whack situations where a weaker geek let people ride up his ass because he was reasonable. I check that the policy is sound and that everybody knows the policy and then start dragging dipshits through the door marked unemployed as a result of my Zero Tolerance, prefferably in front of their coworkers. Don't come back for your last check, we'll mail it to ya. I don't play union games and lawyers don't scare me. Insubordination is exactly that and I don't care if incurable stupidity was your major malfucktion. Fuck with me and your paycheck ends. Period.
This is why I get paid the money and I don't take jobs unless I have full authority to bag dipshits and assholes. The next time you see a geek being a little extreme just remember he's trying to save his job and yours and protecting the network and all related resources is his job.
This CEO did the right thing. Sounds like he has a good man and he knows it. What gives geeks a bad name are the Shit Talkers who can't hold up their end number one, followed by the weak tits.