spugbrap’s blog

News/Info:

My at&t wireless service has been horrible for the past 3 days, and I am not alone. My wife and several friends in my neighborhood (in Bristow, VA) have been having the same issues. We are not able to reliably make or receive calls or text messages. Details on the problems we’ve been having are below in the My Story section.

I finally called 611 for at&t customer service, this evening, and the Customer Service Representative (CSR) told me that this issue is affecting quite a few customers. She rattled off a list of states that were reporting these issues, and although the list may not have included every state in the Northeastern United States, it definitely included most of them. I can say, for sure, that DC, Maryland, and Virginia were on the list, since those are the ones I was listening for.

The CSR found as much information as she could, for me, from her computer and from other reps. As of 5:25pm EDT on 4/13/2008, 3200-something minutes had passed since they first learned of the issue (note: There are 1440 minutes in one day). Although she couldn’t tell me when the problem might be resolved, she said that it’s a “priority” and they’re working on it. For what it’s worth, she told me that our 911 service was still fully functional.

If it’s affecting people in that many different states, I figure that means potentially millions of customers may be without reliable voice and SMS service. The outage does not seem to affect all areas, though, but I know it at least covers about a 5 mile radius around my house. So, the actual number of at&t customers affected may be a lot smaller, if it’s just a bunch of small areas that are experiencing these problems.

My Story:

My cell phone started having issues late Friday night (4/11/2008), but at first I thought it was just my phone acting up. I just upgraded the OS on my AT&T 8525 (HTC Hermes) to Windows Mobile 6 last week, and it’s had a few minor issues every day.So, when a friend of mine IMed me and said they kept getting sent straight to voicemail when calling my mobile number, I figured my phone was just being stupid. So, I tried making an outgoing call, but it just kept saying “Dialing” and could not seem to connect.

I checked my signal strength, and saw that I had only 1 bar. Usually, in my house, I have 3-4 bars and my cell phone works just as well as the landline. So I went outside, to see if my signal would improve. I think it went up to 2 bars or something, and after a couple tries, I was able to call out. But, the call was very broken up and staticky–pretty much useless.

Still thinking it could be my phone’s fault, I went back inside, turned off the phone, and removed the battery and SIM card. I left it that way for a few minutes, since that was one of the troubleshooting steps that a Cingular CSR had be perform when I had some kind of problem last year

After about 5 minutes, I blew the visible dust out of the back of my phone, put it back together, and turned it on. When it was done booting, I still had only 1 signal bar, but I tried to make a call anyways. As expected, it was still not able to connect, and when I told my friend to try calling me again, they said it was still going straight to voicemail.

Oh well, it was late at night, and I needed to go to bed anyways. I didn’t really need to use my phone, so I just hoped it would work better in the morning.

On Saturday, my family and I planned to go out and have a pretty busy day with some friends. I ended up having the kids at home while Lacey went out with her friends Jena and Anne. It was a beautiful day out, so my kids and I went outside and planted some flowers (I tried to call Lacey to find out where, exactly, to plant them, but could not get a call through, so the kids and I just kinda used our best judgement for planting locations.), then took care of some long-overdue outside work (cleaning plant debris off the deck and treehouse).

We were expecting Dallin and Xander to come over eventually, to hang out while the wives were out shopping. I could not seem to get ahold of Dallin, though. When I tried to call him (from my landline), it went straight to voicemail. When I tried to send a text message, the message stayed in the Outbox for longer than usual, then popped up an error saying that it was unable to send.

I retried it a few times, and eventually got it to send, after about 10 minutes or so. I didn’t get a reply, though. About a half hour later, I tried to text him again, but had the same difficulties. A few minutes later, though, I received 2-3 messages from Dallin. Apparently he didn’t receive any of my messages when I sent them, but they had just come through all at once. Along with those messages from Dallin, I also received one from Lacey, which had a timestamp of about 45 minutes before. I tried to reply to Dallin and Lacey, but still could not get messages to go out without several retry attempts.

By this time, my kids were bored out of their minds, and we were all wondering what we should do. I eventually managed to get a voice call to Dallin, and by talking fast and repeating ourselves, we were able to have a short conversation, despite the fact that the call quality was horrible and static dominated the conversation. The gist of the conversation was that they were at their house, and we were going to come over.

So, the kids and I went over to Dallin’s house. We wanted to go out and do something fun, like go to the park and/or Chuck E Cheese’s. The girls had been out for quite a while, though, so we wanted to coordinate with them before going out anywhere. Of course, we were not able to effectively communicate with them. Thankfully, they arrived at Dallin’s house shortly after we did.

We had more trouble communicating with one another that evening (from the park, Burger King in Gainesville, etc.), and still more on Sunday. It’s been quite frustrating for all of us. We take our cell phone service for granted, since it’s usually pretty reliable. Jena and Dallin don’t actually have a landline, anymore, so they are pretty much cut off from the world right now when they’re at home (or anywhere near home).

I noticed that when we took the kids to their swim lessons in Manasass, Sunday evening, our phones worked just fine. We still couldn’t talk/message with Jena and Dallin, though, since they were at home. This is the point when I realized that the service problem seemed to be confined to a 5 mile radius around our neighborhood.

While the kids were swimming, I went ahead and called at&t, which brings me back to where this post started: Widespread outage, no ETA for a fix.

I’ll post updates when I find out anything more. Hopefully this entry is useful for some of those at&t customers that have been having similar frustrations. I was surprised that when I Google searched the web, news, and blogs, I did not find anything about this outage, even though it covers a wide area and has been happening for about 3 days now.