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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."
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"
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.
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.
You couldn't? I've never encountered a Cingular phone with acceptable service. My T720c on Verizon works flawlessly in San Francisco, north of SF, all over New England, and 18 miles out in the Atlantic.
Maybe there's something wrong with your phone on VZW? Or maybe you're in some rural locality I haven't been to.
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
i'd refuse to pay the penalty, they arent delivering the service, so why should you have to pay the fuckwits any more?
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
...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.
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.