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AT&T Releases 'Mark The Spot' Application to Track Network Issues

Unspoken Demise said:
Yeah, why dont you download it, then say negative things.
You can choose where the occurence happened, no matter where you are. So if at home you have crappy quality, you can later submit the report from somewhere else using the map.
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I do not have an iPhone yet. I choose to have consistent service everywhere. If iPhone was on Verizon, then people could just send the report where and when the occurance happened instead of waiting for service else where.

This application must be a response to recent Verizon advertising.
 
humera said:
Wait so, how are we supposed to report No Coverage in an area with, well, no coverage?
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The app supposedly puts a GPS tag on your submission and holds the report until you're within coverage area. But as someone already stated, sometimes the GPS is non-functional as well.

I think this is a step in the right direction. I just got back from Ohio, and the place I was staying at had maybe one bar of EDGE on a good day. I'm eager to try this app. I have lots of odd coverage anomalies where I live, and this might signal the start of some improvements.

To all those people who say that AT&T should be fixing the problem on their own, how do they know where those problems are unless we tell them?
 
Teh Don Ditty said:
Oh how nice, instead of AT&T doing the work themselves they are having us do it for free.

**** you AT&T
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nice buddy....

why hire someone?? when everyone can report things to them...(is it really that hard to report a problem when you have the app right there??) this way they can fix the network faster.( a few million people reporting or a crew of hundreds driving across the land) Instead of the dumb VERIZON guy walking around all year long saying CAN YOU HERE ME NOW? lol
 
NAG said:
Interesting app. Unfortunately the place where my phone drops the most also has a funky gps issue. My iPhone usually says I'm located anywhere from 10 to 20 miles away (and yes, it has the pin point orb thing and not the you're in this general area circle). So I can report the problem but AT&T will get some random spot in the city and not the actual position.
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This isn't a GPS issue. It's actually something wrong with the AT&T network. The iPhone locates you with different information sources with GPS being only one of them. The information that the network cell tower provides is how the iPhones seems to begin its search.

Where I live (Essex county New Jersey), the iPhone tells me that I'm in near the Pennsylvania/NJ border - about 40-50 miles away - when I try to get my current location. When I go to Airplane mode and turn on WiFi, I get the correct location. So something is up with either the nearest tower or something is wrong with our SIM cards. You can make the report and see if others in your area have the same issue.

Otherwise, if things aren't resolved, I'd get a new SIM card activated. This was Apple's advice (confirmed by the WiFi/Airplane mode experiment).
 
I think this is a great step and hope they use this data to keep improving the network. Want to see my money at least go towards some upgrades
 
Good or illusory?

I rarely have anything good to say about AT&T, but this app sounds like a potentially good use of crowdsourcing. The question, of course, is: will this incoming feedback actually be reviewed and acted upon by AT&T, or is this effort primarily to create the "illusion of responsiveness" and make us all just feel better.
 
This app has been available to their employees for a while now. I recall meeting with reps several months ago and seeing this. When asked if I could have it, they said it was internal only for now and would be out in a couple of weeks. Yes, a couple of weeks...so we get it several months later. :rolleyes:
 
This is terrific! I imagine that it caches the report until you have reception, can you verify?

I'm eager to highlight a handful of locations.
 
I just wish I had an "all of the above" option since these things are usually clustered (failed calls...poor voice quality once the call finally goes through...etc). I'll put it in the comments for now, but it would be nice to have the option to prevent the data from getting skewed towards one option. I'd prefer not to have to submit the same report 5 times for each area.
 
I've already sent about 5 reports of no coverage in our on-campus appartments at Cal Poly SLO. I figured I would get in before the millions of messages they're about to get do. Also in the comments I stated how they promised to build a tower to cover our dead spot at the end of last year and how they told me they were going to build a tower at the end of this year. Hopefully this year they will uphold their promise but I seriously doubt it.
 
There are a lot of problem areas AT&T already knows about but they haven't done anything to fix. I got a friend who lives in LA near the intersection of Winnetka and Roscoe. A part of that area is one big dead zone (no signal). My friend has called in and all they said was they're aware of it, were planning to fix it by the end of the week, and offered to let him cancel his plan without penalty. This was about 5 months ago and it's still a dead zone.

This app is just a PR tool
 
NAG said:
Interesting app. Unfortunately the place where my phone drops the most also has a funky gps issue. My iPhone usually says I'm located anywhere from 10 to 20 miles away (and yes, it has the pin point orb thing and not the you're in this general area circle). So I can report the problem but AT&T will get some random spot in the city and not the actual position.
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Same here—I’ll have to set my location manually. (But I think the GPS issue is not due to my location, but due to an Apple bug. Lots of people on Apple’s boards have had it, starting with OS 3.0.)

I’m hoping this app proves to be of some use (not that we’ll ever know) OUTSIDE of big urban centers. AT&T does keep expanding their coverage in small cities and rural areas, and therefore they must be making decisions on where to spend. Having reports come in from a given location may effect those spending priorities.

So my friends who live in a dead zone will be the subject of AT&T outage reports from me. Likewise some rural relatives. Who knows—the nearest tower may get an upgrade (or whatever) sooner as a result of reports like mine. All of the above do have a trace of signal within a block, but it peters to nothing at their actual house. So close and yet so far.

(EDIT: I’d say AT&T’s online zoomable maps are very accurate in reflecting these little local dead zones, too. Must be geography. So get taller towers please :) )
 
I dunno, but here in the UK I've never gone below maximum signal strength with my 5 year old Nokia (except in tunnels and underground), how come AT&T actually has to make an App to report coverage issues?
 
yg17 said:
AFAIK, AT&T is the only carrier to have a simple method like this to report trouble spots. What, do you think Verizon actually has a guy walking around the country with a phone attached to his ear asking "Can you hear me now?"

No company has the manpower to check every nook and cranny of the country to see how coverage is. They can either just let whatever's there or not there stay and not improve it, or they can gather input from their millions of customers who do travel to every nook and cranny of the country. AT&T has chosen to do the latter.
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Verizon does, in a way. I've met one of there guys. They have 50 cell phones in a car connected to a computer that continually makes calls, checks quality, hangs up and does it again. They also have phones of competeing carriers hooked up to make comparisions with the competition. They have lots of these cars and drive all over the place collecting data to ensure that there coverage is indeed better than the competition. Like I said, I met one of these guys and saw the car first hand.
 
Map the results

I benefit when Google tracks cell phones on the streets surrounding my location to provide me with reasonably accurate traffic conditions. I can then plan my route accordingly.

I doubt AT&T would do this, but if they took the real time data from this App and mapped it to a Google map, I could know when I should start an important call or begin a download of a new song or App. Over time, I could even see changes as AT&T addresses the most common problem areas.

The downside would be having to endure the Verizon TV ads, "Problematic 3G coverage? there's a Map for that" until they go away.

Think I'll just sit tight for iPhone 4GS for LTE.
 
information ?

Has anyone seen the information that gets posted back to AT&T from this application ?
 
baryon said:
I dunno, but here in the UK I've never gone below maximum signal strength with my 5 year old Nokia (except in tunnels and underground), how come AT&T actually has to make an App to report coverage issues?
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Because the UK is slightly smaller than Oregon, has a much higher population density (250 people/square km in the UK vs 33 people/square km in the US), is a lot less geographically diverse (for example, the highest point in the UK is only 1,343m, vs 6198m for the US), and all the cell carriers there use the same wireless standard (GSM).

When you combine all of those factors, it's a lot easier to provide comprehensive good coverage there than here.

(Thanks, CIA World Factbook!)
 
I'd like to see something like this for O2 (in the UK).

I don't have an iPhone, and I don't really have any coverage problems, but there are some semi-rural areas that I think should be covered but aren't.
 
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