Slashdot Mirror
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 !
Nope. Guess not :(
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Perhaps "Cingular" refers to their redundancy plan?
Help, Pol...............has a gu............ill us all ........... address is 3 ..........Street....
...for added redundancy?
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
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
I guess it is time to go back to smoke signals...
[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.
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
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.
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.
I told him he could have his network connection back in 48 hours after he had thought about his sins.
When he got back from his weekend business trip, I never again had network problems originating from his office.
Believe it or not, the CEO kept my manager from firing me.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
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.
...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.