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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.
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?"
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.