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Cellular Service Outage Affecting Users in Southeastern United States
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I definitely would be, if I pay for a service, I expect it to be available at all times. And I would want more than the downtime, as the downtime costs me additional money.
Yes and I think it's time we truly find ways to eliminate their use, it can be done, we just need the will power to say enough.
Sounds like the opinion of someone who probably hasn't worked in customer service.
But only in one country, what about outages of other network operators:
I haven't seem news about their problems 😉
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By the same token, does that mean that when there's a power cut, that should also be reported....
We all need to charge our devices & that's not to mention people with iMacs & Mac Pros - surely thats even more relevant by your logic???
What I think some of you are missing is this was not just TALK CELLULAR service. This outage also effected some peoples land based internet AND landline phones. Many cities had to implement emergency procedures for 911 and emergency services because local 911 services were spotty at best. Whenever this kind of stuff happens in a large area here in the states, it of course makes news. Also, Apple is a US based company, and I THINK MacRumors is a US based website. So unless its a major major major outage of multiple carriers from one of those other countries, of course it won't be reported here. Let's keep things in perspective.
I work in customer service and have for a while. You shouldn't have been there in the first place you jagweed.
It's called conserving resources. Towers are not only expensive to maintain, there are considerable legal hurdles to building them. Carriers must get zoning variances and especially in cities where they can't strap a transmitter to a skyscraper there is a heavy NIMBY resistance. But even in large cities like NYC and SF carriers face heavy restrictions, and often co-location -- having multiple carriers have access to a tower, is a requirement because of limited sites w/i an area, and preventing towers from littering an area.
Really wish I could provide multiple upvotes here. 9/10 times, the people that make blanket judgements about customer service haven't worked it once....retail, food service, or otherwise.
You should have, they provide the bulk of the service the country runs on.
The point is however, once all those £4 start adding up, the companies will wake up and realise that they need to something about their infrastructure. We live in first world cities. My electricity has only gone out once in the past 10 years, and that was due to a problem on our street. My water has never suddenly stopped working and neither has my TV signal/radio signal, gas network etc.
Also, I'm sure they have something in their contract with AT&T regarding outages due to the infrastructure. And AT&T probably has something in their contract with the hardware company who's equipment broke down.
This may explain why my signal/service was very weak yesterday and kept dropping out. The outage must have been more wide spread than just those 4 states, because I live in South Carolina around the Myrtle Beach area and I noticed my cellular signal strength was extremely weak. Normally I receive excellent signal strength from AT&T on a daily basis
I phone. 5/6 of the device name is phone. Massive cellular phone outages. So yes it is different. Cellular iPads. The only difference between the wifi ones which people pay the difference for are affected so yes it's different. Basically your logic is that because it's not directly from Apple it isn't relevent which means 99% of the stuff on this site isn't either.
Most of the services you named are single point of failure services. One electrical line, one water line, one gas line. Each of those will remain single point. If any of those have an equipment failure you will be without the service. The idea that you have not lost the service yet is great, but the provider is not going to double up anytime soon just to make sure you don't. Why? Cost. Simply the cost is too high to double everything when so many areas are still left waiting for first time coverage. There are a number of ways services can be affected and overall, can you really say the companies are asleep? In your own local place of being do you yourself not have a few things that could be touched up but you just have not had the time or resources to get them done but know you need/want to?
Not ranting, just saying keep perspective that services are all built to the highest level possible. Lost service is lost revenue and no one wants that but not all services can be on all the time. Look around here for a bit and tell me if you find any other technology provider with a 100% up time.
This was not a signal strength issue. It was stated to be a backhaul issue so you would have had the same signal but no ability to complete a call or transfer data. Your weak signal was due to something else.
And when they are not the customers shouldn't be expected to pay for not getting service at that time, right? Seems fairly rational.
When I worked in a call center, each call into our center had a cost associated with it. If I remember correctly they figured that each call we got averaged a cost of $5.35 and we also watched for call volume increases (we knew Monday would always be the worst, but when there were issues it would go up). Since I know this, I call in whenever I have a disruption in service (whether cell, internet, utility, etc) to get my refund so that not only do I get a refund but my service provider has an additional cost associated with the person taking the call. The overall cost affects the bottom line and with enough expenditure on call center representatives and refunds, maybe the service provider will actually do a better job! If I just "let it go" and not call for my "50 cents", what incentive do they have to actually make improvements in the quality of their service? The answer is None. Maybe I'm naive about this, but customer service is one place businesses hate spending money on.
The unfortunate part in all of that is that the provider will simply raise their prices and/or add on some new fees somewhere to make up for it and basically make the customers pay.