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More on AT&T Wireless's Bungled System Upgrade
An anonymous reader writes "CIO.com has posted a very in-depth article on the recent failings of AT&T Wireless that resulted in the state of the company today. What's fascinating about this article is the sheer amount of accurate information gleaned from former and current employees on the company's bungled attempts to follow FCC mandates on local number portability last November, the inside story on outsourcing efforts, and terrible executive management decisions that ultimately led to its demise. Ironically, the scathing and sometimes highly sarcastic commentary at the end of the article from former employees makes this read even better."
I don't give AT&T Wireless any credit whatsoever. For God's sake! They can't even figure out how to properl set the time on their towers.
In the Boston area, they reset the time for their towers by setting the clocks forward one hour at Daylight Savings Time (as opposed to properly setting the "Daylight Savings Time flag). Now whenever you use Cingular's network, you get the proper settings, but as soon as you go bact to AT&T, it puts you an hour ahead on wintertime hours.
Yeah, it is. 3G is based on CDMA. GSM is evolving through EDGE into WCDMA and current CDMA systems are evolving into CDMA2000. It has absolutely nothing to do with the US, the major players in mobile phone standards are all outside the US.
Read the article very carefully. You will see refrences to SILOS. This is where the current inner working people dont want to change the way they do thaing therefore, will not participate in converstions, upgrades and may do a little sabatoging. I have seen it first hand and the first thing Stan Stan Sigman said when he entered cingular was that the silos will be torn down. This probably makes the managers at att quiver (no it makes them update their resume).
You aren't actually going to be able to obtain 500k/sec on any CDMA system for quite a few years either. That bandwidth is a marketing number, you share it with others. Reality will be more like 50kb /sec.
Never finishing and continuing to bill is the whole point though.
No kidding! I worked for a large consulting company for a short period. In my first and only review, my programming efficiency was listed as a bad point. Oral explanation: we make money based on the number of hours we bill not based on the number of projects we finish.
GSM runs on 800MHz too. CDMA does cut down on background noise, but the voice quality suffers because of it.
She started out by developing the industry standards, and then learned all to quickly to play Government Fat Cat. When we look back at the contributions to science that came out of Bell Labs, both in communications and computer science; it is easy to see that this was once truly an industry giant.
But like all giants, when you get used to playing 800 pound gorilla, you stop thinking and just keep throwing your weight around.
Even after it became public knowledge that Ma Bell was holding back technological advancement for their own purposes and profit, as long as the lobby on the hill kept a few important palms crossed, the tyranny continued. Finally, after a couple rounds of public humilliations and rebukes, the government was forced to order the split-up.
But very deeply imbedded in each and every part of the baby Bells was the crippling notion that they were the best and only company and that the thought of changing their behavior neven even had the slightest possibility of beginning to cross their tiny little corporate brains.
To make a long story short, their corporate egos never evolved back to being lean mean compedetive machines. If there ever was a company that should get back to it's roots of research and innovation this would have been it; but the chance is gone.
My local baby Bell, for example, relies on their internet customers to have their error checking turned off, when they visit the customer service website. As a developer I keep mine turned on and get about a half-dozen errors when each page loads, and a few more with each and every control encountered. Why is it that they still behave like the customer doesn't matter? Because in each division there is at least 1 fat cat who is more concerned with their own well being than anything else; and someone who profits by their actions does their level headed best to keep them there.
Whatever happened to quality of service?
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
It took 20 min to query a record in that CRM nightmare.
You dont have happy customer service representivs when you cant do anything for the customer because the "system is down"
Ofcourse I belive alot of these problems are fixed now and TELUS had a bad time that year with the BC fires and such.
Ohh and phones have 2 modes.. "Hold" which plays music and you cant hear anything.. which I would think would be used for 20 min.. or Mute.. which is for small pauses. But ya.. i agree with you.. alot of the CSR's i got didnt even know how to use the software that wasnt even working.
Has anyone ever checked out the AT&T wireless coverage maps? Your 'local calling area' (the places where you don't roam') are like a shade of orange lighter than the 'roaming' area. So to many males and people with less than good eyesight, it all looks the same.
Check it out on your own at http://www.mlife.com
Uh, oh. I'm working as a consultant on a project at a major mobile telecom company in Europe, helping them to update their intranet.
The intranet contents is instrumental to the call centers, which I believe are profit centers, which in turn means that the intranet must be "always" available to the call center agents, while the intranet budget is quite limited (i.e. have to re-use old hardware).
Here's the bummer: they have a couple of call centers strewn all over the place, and they want the contents replicated as static HTML files to each call center location, because they can't keep up the network connections between the remote offices and headquarters. At the same time, all call center calls are obviously routed through their own network, as well. So why can they keep voice going, but not data over the same fiber links they're running?
Essentially, because internal IT is a cost center.
What amazed me the most, the utter arrogance of management to think they could pull off a huge project on the backs of workers that were about to receive a choice part of management's anatomy once the project was over.
As another poster mentioned, where was mention of D&T in the article? I can only wonder if the arrogance didn't start there and just kind of honey-coat AT&T's top management, some sort of golf course power orgy no doubt with the D&T suits out spinning tales of the far east, cheap educated unorganized labor as far as the eyes can see and, you know those indians, fertile people, there is no end to this bounty. Imagine all the fat bonuses as productivity skyrockets. You see, it will actually drop but the costs will drop even more, making the department more productive by any measure management will make...
Purring along while back in the basement little tribes of coders were all amuk, running up against eachother while their replacements followed them around peppering questions in british-accented englindian, erm, englian? indlish? I was going to say I'm glad i wasn't there but the more I think about it, after a while it must have gotten kind of funny and surreal, mabye it was a blast, everyone fiddling away while the crm dbs burned.
closed minded is as closed minded does
W-CDMA has basically been accepted as the 3g standard in Europe and Japan. W-CDMA is not owned by Qualcomm, it's the main competitor. Qualcomm has a vested interest in seeing CDMA2000 suceed, and they're struggling to make that happen. They aren't in a position to force it on anyone, especially outside the US where GSM reigns virtually universally.
You appear to be confused as to what LNP really means. It's not like a DNS CNAME, it's like telling the internet that an IP address on one of IBM's class A nets should be routed to MCI instead. Each mobile carrier gets a block of phone numbers in specific exchanges. The exchanges tell the phone network which carrier to route the call to. LNP means changing the infrastructure of the mobile network to route exchanges to a different carrier.
The carriers can't just program in the ID of your phone for a different network, because that phone doesn't connect to their network.
Good riddance to AWE and I wonder if Cingular is going forward with the outsourcing.
I work for Cingular. I am not priivy to any information about the buyout at all, so don't sick the FTC on me. All we have really been told is that (a) it's a buyout not a merger, and (b) we have to get prepared to port their customers into our billing systems asap once the buyout goes through.
So, from this, I can guess that (a) down the road we're getting rid of all of their employees and (b) we're getting rid of as much of their software as we can.
Our billing/CRM system works pretty well (especially for former Bellsouth markets), so we don't expect too many issues.
As far as outsourcing, we have a support contract with Alltel for a couple of years, but their developers all are idiots, so I hope we can convince senior management to dump them. For offshore work, there are apparently some things being outsourced to eastern Europe, but no plans to expand that or
idiot. do you really think they conceived the offshoring plan after the fuckup and implemented it within days? didn't you read that some CxO publically announced the outsourcing in the middle of the project?
At least 8 years - I bought a pair of cell phones when my wife was expecting. More than once, it was faster to just drive where I was trying to call rather than wait for a circuit. I live along the major 'drive trunk' (Route 80, 50 miles west of NYC, more or less) - you'd think they'd have sprung for some capacity THERE, but nope. When the contract expired I switched to a company that actually had some equipment. AT&T called me once to try to convince me to switch back - I laughed at them. I wondered how long they'd last with that level of "service". Now we know.
> I'm no techno-protectionist I remember discussing the inevitable introduction of competition from overseas back in the late 1980s
Outsourcing is in the news today but it's been around for many, many years. The difference here has nothing to do with WHERE outsourcing was going to, it could just have easily been IBM or EDS. The issue is HOW the outsourcing was handled.
I was at one of Cringley's speeches (which was even better than his films or articles!) when he was taking Q&A from the audience. Outsourcing came up and his first example was AWE and how they announced the plan and the next day the CIO drove to work in a Ferrari! I sold my stock the next day (all the sorrier I held it long).
R7
I am a customer of AT&T Enterprise Hosting. They have some great data centers and they run them with no single point of failure. The same can not be said for their business process. I tried to renew my contract with AT&T for a $1500/month rack cabnet. This renewal was for one year. I has taken two months and about 30 emails and another 40 phone calls to get everything worked out. I guess my stupid account has taken up about 80 man hours to renew a contract. This does not include my own time, which is better spent running my company. If the rest of the company is run the same way, then run away. I am now planning a move of my servers from AT&T to any one else.
Actually, I really *do* use att wireless and it really *does* have wireless Internet. (But I'm not on my phone right now.) It's still working. The "wireless Intnernet" is not the best since it's all WAP pages. To really get to any websites, you've gotta go through google--google has a WAP proxy server that operates behind the scenes to ensure that when you click on a google search result, you actually get a page back.
I was on my phone and yahoo messenger was working earlier this evening. Whatever att and cingular did, the "phone net" appears to still be functional.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
The quote absolutely was not taken out of context. I was at AWS when this happened, and listened to this conference call just like the rest of the IT employees. It really was supposed to be a motivatioal thing, but it fell on its face. I know I and a number of others started looking for a new job that very day.
From what I've heard, it's a great sales automation tool. For CRM, though, it "needs a lot of maturing."
Internal IT for these people isn't a cost center. Its a piece of critical infrastructure, one that has to be carefully tied and responsive to their core business.
Of course that's obvious to us, but have you ever tried explaining it to someone who only believes what he sees on a spreadsheet?
I maintain cellular telephone switches (not for ATTWS, or even in the USA) and sit in front of 3 486s and a 386 most days. The top 2 layers of our corperate structure are populated by people who rose through the ranks of the accounting department.
The network is held together by shoestrings, yet the sales department gives away BMWs to sales people who meet 100% of their quarterly targets - that's right, a bonus for just completing their assigned tasks. (what, me bitter?)
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
I've been in the situation before where you are fairly sure that things are going downhill in the company and that layoffs are already starting to sprout up.
It is an absolutly horrible environment to work in, to the point where you feel physically sick when you wake up in the morning to get ready to go to work. That being said i've seen some people in this situation fight to the last breath to try and prop the company back up. The difference in the AT&T wireless situation is that these employees knew that even if they did get the system up, they were going to get the shaft. I couldnt even imagine how horrible it would be to have people tag around with you to be your replacements.
In general I stick with small companies that cant afford the logistics of outsourcing. The apparent security of working for a big company is just an illusion if you have any morals and dont step on other people to keep your job.
The Ro Factor - Jeep/Linux Weblog
"Yes, AT&T Wireless (now part of Cingular) had its share of problems. There's no doubt about that. But at they made the right decision to choose GSM. Verizon and Sprint PCS chose wrongly, and so they are destined to fail."
Sprint PCS and Verizon use CDMA2000, hereby referred to as "CDMA".
Right. CDMA must be worse because it handles more users per cell, right? Or is it because it doesn't have hard cell-size limits? Or... how about the fact that it copes with noise better. Or the fact that it uses less power to go the same distance. Or is it that the voice quality is better?
Look, GSM has some advantages (worldwide standard, SIM, cool phones), but CDMA is fundamentally the better technology. That's why the new GSM (UMTS) system uses CDMA technology.
Verizon Wireless is doing great. So is Sprint. Verizon is 2nd to ATT/Cingular. And most of ATT/Cingular's customers are still using IS-136 (D-AMPS). Sprint has captured a stunning market share with there relatively new network.
"There is only room for one mobile phone technology in this world, and it's not CDMA. I know the US government is behind it, but they cannot force us all to use it."
Right. Just like there is only room for one operating system. Just like there is only room for one political opinion.
The US government *is* behind the usage of CDMA in the US. But it's not because they mandated CDMA. Far from it. In Europe, GSM *was* mandated. Mandating GSM had some advantages - Europe had a fully-digital system with good coverage far before the US did (part of that has to do with population density).
But not mandating GSM also had advantages in the US. We had competition between formats. CDMA was developed and implemented because carriers had the ability to choose the best standard.
GSM is, realistically, not the right standard for the US. GSM cells are too small for rural areas - much smaller than AMPS cells. The carriers who have deployed GSM in the US have learned the hard way that covering Wyoming or Kansas with GSM cells is extremely difficult.
That's one sillyass way of doing it, the way you'd expect ancient telco engineers steeped in the way of old electromechanical switches to come up with.
.forward in my old IBM email address to send to MCI. Phone numbers haven't mapped directly to physical wire connections in years -- and never for wireless phones.
Another way to handle it is, if user A at telco T switches to telco Q, set A's number in T to forward the call to some new (but unrevealed to the world at large) number in Q's domain, which broadcasts to A's phone. It's not like the phone number is actually stored in the phone.
Okay, you chew through phone numbers faster that way, but that's a known quantity.
Think of it as setting up a
-- Alastair
I was a developer (customizer?) of Siebel from Siebel 99 on up to Siebel 7, and I can say that it is the most expensive, useless piece of software I have ever seen. Reading this article was painfully familiar. Their system is amazing for their company, but if you don't use it exactly as they do (and why would you, unless you are a company that sells CRM software), you run into one of thousands of undocumented issues. And if you need support, no problem.. after the few hundred thousand for the software, throw another $100K at em for a year of support. And the support you get is mostly bug fixes. What a great company. People are also usually a few years behind with the releases since an upgrade takes over a year to do right if you have any customizations. Oh, and the reason they changed it from Siebel 2000 to Siebel 7 was that they missed the release for Siebel 7 by like a year, so they switched to numbering so they didn't have to change the year of the product.