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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."
YOU may have been having similar problems, but this is not the same thing. Half of Cingular's network is down. This started on Friday. This is one person having problems such as in your case, this is millions of people. And I think if it couldn't find service and shut off maybe power cycling your phone would help...
I love how people blame phone companies for mobiles phone problems. Really, Motorola phone, try blaming motorola.
I havnt seen any good benchmark sites for phones, but seems there would be a need when you can pick 20 types of phone for each carrier. Even nokia alone has 50+ phones that might work on a carrier, and each have different problems, battery life, attenna strength, etc.
Sorry it's offtopic, but... This is EXACTLY why firewalls are virtually useless on corporate networks. I have gotten in so many arguments with so-called "security experts" that are convinced they don't need to bother with keeping internal machines up to date, because the magic of the firewall will protect them. Instead, they don't do much more than foul up legitimate traffic and lead management into a false sense of security.
Comparing Europe to America is a little silly, when we need hundreds of thousands of basestations to cover all of America. And then you we have the FCC only permitting so much spectrum per carrier. Cell sites are coming down in price, but its a little more expensive when you have to make it look like a tree, cactus, palm tree or church steepel.
Those billion dollar loans from foreign telcos are for infrastructure. First to cover North America with a high speed data network, wins.
no offense, but that is the kind of geek behavior that scares people away from geeks, rather than accepting them. most "geek-phobia" comes from geeks being ultraelitist and scoff at regular users who just don't understand and know better. so i'm glad you made your point, had your fun, and kept your job, but maybe if you tried to reason things out in laymen's terms you'd better the world a little bit more.
just my 2 cents though
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 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
So, it's you're business phone, and your livelihood depends on its reliability, but you balk at $8.50 more per month for decent service?
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
I actually cut a CEO's network cable in half (in front of him and his just-about-to-faint secretary) for doing something quite similar.
If you can't deal with a CEO plugging his virus-infected laptop into your network, that only goes to show that your internal security and antivirus measures suck. Your network won't be secure and reliable unless you can prevent virus infections from spreading internally.
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!
Firewalls aren't useless. Traffic shaping and filtering is an important part of one's perimeter defenses. Unfortunately, there are two major flaws that firewall vendors want you to ignore:
- Much like a stoplight, firewalls must allow some traffic through them, i.e. they are traffic control mechanisms. One can still attack any system whose traffic is permitted to pass through the firewall.
- Firewalls, like all perimeter defenses, cannot mitigate the risk of insider attacks, as Slammer and MSBlaster illustrated.
As with every threat (except for werewolves), there is no silver bullet, no magic countermeasure that by itself will mitigate every risk. One must deploy a variety of countermeasures against an even greater variety of threats and vulnerabilities, including traffic shaping and filtering (which could include firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and hybrid firewall-IDS aka intrusion prevention systems), configuration management (including software patches and malicious mobile code detection), and so forth and so on. These countermeasures must be deployed at several levels to afford adequate protection, e.g. both in the network core and at the network edge. Anyone who tells you different is a fool, as you so correctly described the "security consultants" you dealt with.I only make these points to remind everyone of the concept of "defense in depth". There is no magic security solution that is all countermeasures to all threats.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
But why aren't all your NT servers patched? Because the patches have along history of breaking all the apps, and the system owners won't let us until it is tested on the test box which means we are always behind a few patch levels. We have never had a any virus on any flavour of Unix, but we had a groups of tech running through the computer room yanking out lan cables on all the NT boxes one very memorable evening.
Anarchists never rule