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Handhelds Wireless Networking Hardware

Major Problems with Cingular Network 382

Posted by michael from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.
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."
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Major Problems with Cingular Network More

Major Problems with Cingular Network

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  • rolled over (Score:5, Funny)

    by maddu ( 522722 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:36AM (#7075800)
    Congular rolled over !

  • Ack! (Score:2, Funny)

    by halo1982 ( 679554 ) *
    First power networks, now cell phone networks...PATCH YOUR WINDOWS!
    • First power networks, now cell phone networks...PATCH YOUR WINDOWS!

      Unfortunately, this won't happen while these namby-pamby virus attacks continue to merely disrupt things. Virus writers need to start making their viruses destroy the computers they infect after spreading. Maybe consumers or Microsoft will actually start doing something if their computers get destroyed every damned week.

      • ...Maybe consumers or Microsoft will actually start doing something if their computers get destroyed every damned week.

        Yeah, but probably the wrong things. Think about how "security" increased after 9/11 in the US. Lots of new hassles, civil rights trashed, privacy eroded even more, but very little true security. I dread the day virus writers get really destructive. I'm sure M$ would use such an attack to come up with even more "not interoperable" techniques. But now they can do it openly in the nam

  • Can you hear me now? (Score:5, Funny)

    by egg troll ( 515396 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:37AM (#7075802) Homepage Journal
    Nope. Guess not :(

    • Re:Can you hear me now? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Appearently you're confusing a broken cingular with a theoretically functional Verizon. I can see how you made such an error; I certainly couldn't tell the difference in performance.
      • 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.
    • Hello!
      Hello!
      Are you there?
      Hello!
      I called you up
      to say hello.
      I said hello.
      Can you hear me, Joe?

      Oh, no.
      I can not hear your call.
      I can not hear your call at all.
      This is not good
      and I know why.
      A mouse has cut the wire.
      Good-by![sic]

      - Geisel, Theodor S., 1960, pp. 24-25, "One fish two fish red fish blue fish"

  • cingular (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:40AM (#7075820)
    Perhaps "Cingular" refers to their redundancy plan?

  • Service completely out... (Score:5, Funny)

    by danielsfca2 ( 696792 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:41AM (#7075821) Journal
    Which is just a tiny bit different than the typical quality of service at Cingular. I would never do business with them. Judging by the way it sounds when I talk to my girlfriend on her Cingular phone, I can just imagine an emergency call:

    Help, Pol...............has a gu............ill us all ........... address is 3 ..........Street....

    • What the message actually is... (Score:5, Funny)

      by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @02:02AM (#7075897) Homepage
      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
      • I think it needs to be added to, though...

        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. ... Oh! I just realised I accidentally dialled 911 instead of Polly. Sorry officer, you can go back to sleep now.

  • Works here... (Score:2, Informative)

    by LamerX ( 164968 )
    It seems to be working okay here in Olympia, WA and it was working today in Seattle when I was up there. But maybe it wasn't, maybe thats why I haven't been getting any phone calls... But I did get some this evening... Anyone with troubles in the Seattle Area?

    • Re:Works here... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Wakkow ( 52585 ) * on Sunday September 28, 2003 @02:08AM (#7075919) Homepage
      Go ahead and post your number here. We'll all test it for you...

      I'm sure a phone slashdotting will help their network out a lot. =)

      • Slashdotting phones... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by freeBill ( 3843 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @05:11AM (#7076319) Homepage
        ...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.
        • > There was a lady on the show who called herself "The Recipe Detective."

          Was?

          For information and 20 free recipes, send a SASE to:

          Gloria Pitzer
          Box 237
          Marysville, MI., 48040

          Ms. Pitzer publishes a number of cookbooks, all of which you can order directly. Information here [askyourneighbor.com]. She also publishes a quarterly newsletter for $16 per year, send it to the same address.

          Ms. Pitzer is on WNZK 690AM out of Detroit every Tuesday from 10:30am to 11:00am. You can listen to the program that she appears on over the i

  • Have you considered using bongo drums... (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Revolutionary ( 694752 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:43AM (#7075830) Homepage Journal
    ...for added redundancy?

  • The end of the world is upon us... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Admiral1973 ( 623214 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:46AM (#7075845) Homepage
    The Cubs win their division and make the playoffs, leading to cell phone outages in the US, power outages all over Italy [cnn.com], and more hurricanes are coming. [cnn.com] Better get ready for the rapture!

  • Last month (Score:5, Interesting)

    by papasui ( 567265 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:47AM (#7075846) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Last month (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28, 2003 @02:16AM (#7075942)
      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.

    • Re:Last month (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Penguinshit ( 591885 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @02:29AM (#7075982) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • Re:Last month (Score:4, Insightful)

        by pimpinmonk ( 238443 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @04:54AM (#7076284)
        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

        • Re:Last month (Score:4, Interesting)

          by lars_stefan_axelsson ( 236283 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @06:18AM (#7076412) Homepage
          who just don't understand and know better

          While that may be the case in a 'civilian' setting, I'd venture a guess that this was an oh-so-common case of the CEO thinking that the rules he signed for the rest of the company to follow, didn't apply to him. I mean he's the CEO after all.

          Virus infestation or Enron scandals abound as a result.

        • Or, sometimes one is able to make a point a thousand times more effectively through one dramatic action than through a bunch of politically correct consensus building.

          As told, the action does sound a bit silly, but the story is short enough on details that it makes it just about impossible to really decide either way from the context. The only detail that might lead one to make a judgement is that the CEO decided that he liked the behaviour enough to keep the guy around.

          Believe it or not, some CEOs actua
        • 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.

          You say that like it's a bad thing. I think a healthy dose of fear of geeks can be exactly that - healthy. It keeps me from having to pull out the cattle prod and KY Jelly to get my point across.

          Keep up the good work GP!

        • Re:Last month (Score:3, Informative)

          by NoMaster ( 142776 )
          I've actually done similar things - even pulled off the apocryphal "put it back in the box, take it back to the shop, and tell them you're too fsckin' stupid to own a computer!" line once - but only as a last resort. It goes like this :
          1. Explanation
          2. Explanation with attached threat
          3. Carry out threat

          The trick is to choose your targets, and do it all with good grace and a sense of humour. If you've done it right, not only will you keep your job, but you'll probably be known as that guy who knows his stuff and can

      • Re:Last month (Score:5, Insightful)

        by penguin7of9 ( 697383 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @09:26AM (#7076820)
        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.

    • Re:Last month (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FirstOne ( 193462 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @05:44AM (#7076368) Homepage
      "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."

      These days I never go into a client site without my OWN firewall/NAT, which has it's own little 4 port switching hub. I use a Dlink DI-604, which cost me a whole $20 after rebate. The firewall/NAT lets me connect both my laptops and set up a "Whitelist" of client systems and internet sites I need to access. Thus one can avoid needless exposure of one's own systems to Client/Internet and vice a versa without some extra protection.

      A side benefit is that I don't have to change the network settings between Office and Client work sites. :-)

      Saves a lot of headaches about installing the client's latest XXX corporate anti-virus whatever. Note: Installing the client's site licensed AV Software would make me a pirate the moment my laptops left the job site. Never did use M$ security hole infested email programs. I also recently retired IE to backup browser status, it's no longer worth the patching nightmare. I now use Firebird as my default browser.

      All in all, a few extra steps.. but worth it..

    • Same thing happened to my network a couple of weeks ago. Firewall was blocking all the nasties but someone with an infected laptop plugged in...There were quite a few unpatched systems, but Norton stopped them from getting infected, so luckily there was practially no harm done, unless you count the calls from users saying Norton is giving them a warning that a virus has walked into their system.

  • well (Score:5, Funny)

    by mwhahaha ( 172475 ) <mwhahaha AT vt DOT edu> on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:48AM (#7075850)
    I guess it is time to go back to smoke signals...

  • AT&T Network having similar problems... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ChangeOnInstall ( 589099 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:48AM (#7075852)
    I noticed similar problems with the AT&T GSM network last week. And the week before. And for about six months, continuously, before that. I couldn't receive calls pretty much anywhere, and couldn't place calls anywhere. The problem stopped abruptly last week, but I believe it may have been coincedental to my signing up with Verizon, and swapping my Motorola GSM phone for an LG whatever-verizon-uses-that-isn't-GSM-phone.

    If you live in the US, avoid GSM like the plague. Especially in Southern California. I was effectively unreachable when I had GSM. Now that I'm back to traditional service, I can almost see dropping the land line.

    And of course, to make matters worse, my Motorola T720 would only try for so long to sign back on to the netowrk when it went out of range. After that it just stops, displays "Unregistered SIM", and is effecitvely shut off. So if you're out of range for 30 minutes, you're out of range all day!

    </rant>
    • You just described my entire experience with AT&T after moving to SoCal. Also, I too was cursed with the hellishly awful T720 phone and now that I'm not longer a customer, I'm trying to come up with an appropriately vindictive way to demolish that shiny little instrument of frustration...

      Any good ideas?

      Regards,
      Ross

      • Re:AT&T Network having similar problems... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @02:09AM (#7075921) Journal
        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.

        • The phones are hardly an issue anymore on a _proper_ gsm network(of course, battery life matters and physical wear), all new phones do actually work. Oh yeah, i'm punching this on a mobile right now, but the point is that the network can be done properly.

  • Apparently this started in Atlanta (Score:4, Informative)

    by halo1982 ( 679554 ) * on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:52AM (#7075863) Homepage Journal
    Yeah...apparently the problem started in Atlanta. Something went out there, and it switched over to a backup in Chicago, and I guess it couldn't handle the extra traffic so there was a cascading failure? Wait a minute, this sounds familiar... This is only on Cingular's GSM, not their TDMA. Those with TDMA and GAIT phones are able to use the service normally. Also, it seems like its only around mid america to the east coast.
    • My phone is TDMA and GAIT and hasn't worked for 3 days.

    • Re:Apparently this started in Atlanta (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ingenium13 ( 162116 ) <ingeniumNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday September 28, 2003 @02:08AM (#7075917) Homepage
      Well, I have a good friend w/ a TDMA Cingular phone. Yesterday the service was flaky. I called him from my Sprint phone and I got a "unreachable" message from Cingular, not his voicemail. I tried a few more times and it went to his voicemail finally, but never actually to his phone. Today it was down all day. He couldn't make or receive calls. Another friend of mine has a GSM Cingular phone and she couldn't receive calls either. I'd get the same message. When I tried calling from a Verizon phone to both phones I got a fast busy signal instead. My friend said he could still receive the text messages I sent him though. At 11:30pm EDT he texted me saying his phone was working again, but I didn't receive the message on my sprint phone until midnight when he sent me another. I called him on his phone and it worked fine at midnight. So I guess whatever the problem was is resolved now.

  • Cingular... (Score:5, Funny)

    by pspeed ( 12169 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:52AM (#7075869)
    [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.]

  • Stuff from Cingular tech support (Score:5, Informative)

    by taped2thedesk ( 614051 ) * on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:55AM (#7075876)
    I called customer service earlier today... the techs sounded pretty stressed out. They told me if I wasn't having problems, I would be fine as long as I didn't power cycle the phone. When the phone is powered on and tries to reregister itself with the network, it can't. Of course, my battery died before I could get to a charger.

    I'm still without a connection, and when people call my number, they don't even get my voicemail... just a fast busy signal.

    Damn you Cingular! I'm switching providers! Wait, I'm locked into a two year contract :-/ I knew that was a bad idea.

    • Re:Stuff from Cingular tech support (Score:4, Informative)

      by michaelhood ( 667393 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @02:06AM (#7075912)
      I'm sure you could get out of that contract on the grounds that they didn't uphold their end. IANAL, but there are reasonable expectations on delivery of service in a contract.They are likely in breach of this, seeing as how their service is totally unreachable and unusable.

      People cannot even reach your voicemail. This would cost me more money per day than the penalty for axing my Sprint contract, anyways.

      Call them. End your contract. Get a better provider.
      (FYI: Sprint is NOT one, as soon as number portability kicks in I'm out).

    • Re:Stuff from Cingular tech support (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If what this guys says is true, it sounds like one or more of their HLR's are down.

      A HLR (home location register) is the node in a GSM network that stores yours subscription data and keeps track of where you are. When you turn your phone on, the MSC (mobile services centre, this is the local switch) will query the HLR to find out your subscription level and get some authentication details. If the HLR is down, you can't get on the network.

  • Problem started a week ago... (Score:4, Informative)

    by sohojim ( 676510 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:55AM (#7075877) Homepage
    My Cingular (Chicago-area) phone quit receiving calls 10 days ago. After 3 days of their horrible tech support, I finally found a rep who said that their system had no record of my SIM card, and that the records must have "gotten lost." He re-entered them, and all was well for two days, and then the problem recurred. This time, I was told that it was a national problem that had occurred a couple of days earlier. During all of this, I've called *611 dozens of times, and the hold times are well above average. I used to work in one of Cingular's Call Center IT departments; I just emailed a friend who's still there to see what's going on...
    • My Cingular (Chicago-area) phone quit receiving calls 10 days ago. After 3 days of their horrible tech support, I finally found a rep who said that their system had no record of my SIM card, and that the records must have "gotten lost." He re-entered them, and all was well for two days, and then the problem recurred. This time, I was told that it was a national problem that had occurred a couple of days earlier. During all of this, I've called *611 dozens of times, and the hold times are well above average.

  • Cingular. It's happened. (Score:5, Funny)

    by questamor ( 653018 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:57AM (#7075879)
    Skynet has become self aware

  • This is why... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BitwizeGHC ( 145393 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @01:59AM (#7075887) Homepage
    This is why land lines are a MUST when you want to get back out of the Matrix.
  • Errrrr I mean )(/"%*!)( NO CARRIER !

    No carrier jokes never die. They only go offline for a while.
  • As a matter of fact, about thirty seconds after loading this story I got a call on my Cingular GSM phone from one of my friends who also has a Cingular GSM phone.

  • Cingular Problems (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @02:37AM (#7076002) Homepage
    There is an interesting story [bizjournals.com] 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.
  • ... And while some have shown skepticism of the usefulness or even safety of the massive networking project, voices at the Pentagon are enthusiastic. "This will be the end of networking issues as we know it. EVeryhting will be different after tomorrow."

  • And therefore... (Score:3, Funny)

    by CGP314 ( 672613 ) <CGP@ColinGregor y P a lmer.net> on Sunday September 28, 2003 @02:43AM (#7076018) Homepage
    redundancy is good.

    So does that mean you will be picking up a mistress in addition to your wife?

  • Is fine in Middle Tennessee, for the moment.

    Of course, the phone isn't GSM exclusively in this area. My phone does GSM and one other (TDMA?) and if the GSM is failing I assume either the phone is still working in the other band, or the GSM in this area is (luckily) not down (yet).

    Oh well, not that I care. If someone can't reach me online, they're probably not someone I care to speak to.
  • Some post earlyer about TCP/IP over Bongo Drumbs?

    Expermenting with VOIP is good and all but...

  • I too have been having problems... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @03:08AM (#7076086)
    The switch over to GSM is not going well. I renewed my plan last summer after 2 years of great service with cingular, but I and my Fiance both got new Nokia 6340 (Which is a GAIT phone that works on both regular and GSM networks) phones and have had nothing but problems. I had just gotten back from Europe where I used Vodophone's GSM network quite well and was looking forward to it being in the US, but its horrible.

    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...

    • i'd refuse to pay the penalty, they arent delivering the service, so why should you have to pay the fuckwits any more?
    • 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

      ...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...

      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?
    • I am of the opinion that Cingular broke their contract with you by NOT providing the service in which they are contracted to perform...

      If anything they should be paying you... Definately refuse to pay any cancellation fees due to breech of contract on their part ... I'm unemployed, so lets call that my .01
  • However, even if Cingular's network was taken down by a virus, that still demonstrates incompetence on their part.

  • Their new slogan... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tracy Reed ( 3563 ) <treed@ultraviolet.oMONETrg minus painter> on Sunday September 28, 2003 @03:42AM (#7076165) Homepage
    "Can you hear me YET?"
  • Yet another reason to keep the AMPS (old analogue cell network) online. Yes, it's not used all that often, but it's the network in place for countless emergency and periodic industrial applications (OnStar, for example) and it's a backup that is supported on nearly every phone out there. (did you buy a single-mode phone?)

    Yes, it's a price and spectrum hog, but it should be there as a backup. The cell companies should not be allowed to have backup systems for something as vital as cellular communication.
    • The problem is that AMPS is used by a dwindling number of users and there isn't enough spectrum at 800 MHz to keep it and 800 MHz CDMA/GSM/TDMA running at full capacity. AMPS will eventually disappear, at least in urban areas where channel capacity is a problem. The FCC is planning to remove the requirement to support AMPS within 5 years.

  • OMG (Score:2)

    by Bruha ( 412869 )
    Skynet is becoming active!

  • Good opportunity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Oswald ( 235719 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @09:11AM (#7076770)
    I have nothing truly on-topic to add here, since my phone only speaks TDMA. But since my wife and I are impatiently waiting until November 24 so we can change providers (and keep our phone numbers), and since we have already put up with almost 3 years of ever-deteriorating "service" (e.g. I can hold my phone in my hand, observe that I'm receiving 2 or 3 cells, dial myself from another phone--and get my voice mail about one time in five) from these fuck-wads, this seems like the perfect forum to say

    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.

  • Gads. What a commentary upon society (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @09:15AM (#7076789) Homepage Journal
    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!

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