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Cellular Service Outage Affecting Users in Southeastern United States
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It appears that this situation is not related to their infrastructure though, and it was a hardware issue with AT&T, thus my comment about how something like this would have a trickle down effect where customers are asking for refunds from their carriers and the carriers will be reviewing their contract with AT&T and AT&T will be reviewing their contract with the hardware company that they purchased the failing equipment from.
Of course other situations are not exactly the same.
"$4 is not a big deal" argument cuts both ways. If it is such a small sum, why don't your company reimburse all customers living in the area $4 automatically and announce its benevolence through free text messages?
I don't pay up to $65 for my service, I pay *exactly* $65. Yet, the company sees no problem providing me *up to* 30 full days of service. (Applies to my cable broadband service that occasionally cuts out at night for a number of minutes, yet always expects full payment.)
I agree. With the amount of money the carrier make on data plans for years, I would expect them to own their own towers by now.
You don't have to dumb yourself down to work in customer service and try to avoid seeing that a lot of customers are complete morons. I've worked enough Black Fridays and dealt with enough customers that I know there are both sides of the spectrum. Yes there are some awesome thoughtful customers as well as normal ones, but complete morons do tend to come out of the wood work on special events. Some customers just want to vent and you happen to be there; They're *******s, just like if I was to vent to a someone just because I could and their job was at stake if they replied appropriately, it makes no difference. As someone who works in customer service, it's OK to vent about this. Either way if it makes you feel better, I don't work in customer service anymore.
As opposed to who, exactly?
As much as I like to heave ire at AT&T, the chunk of it that manages their wholesale data transport business has bugger all to do with the chunks of AT&T that most of us as individuals interact with.
There are plenty that things that cut that way -- http://notalwaysright.com -- as they do the other way -- http://notalwaysworking.com
If cellular service were down over that wide an area for multiple carriers, then that means multiple MTSO's (switches, or site hubs) representing literally hundreds of cell sites were also down. Is a very big deal, and not just because users couldn't watch cat videos or share hateful comments on Facebook.
I was in the effected area. I would sometimes get cell signal. Was usually 2 bars and on Edge network. It would do for, there to no service and back again during the outage. Even when I had cell signal I couldn't make or receive calls or use data. So what that poster experienced indeed could have been part of the outage. Also, it was in more than 4 states. I think it was 5 or 6. I have a very close friend who works at the AT&T call center here. He told me they had over 400 towers that were down because of this. That was also confirmed by the peeps at the AT&T store.
You would be amazed at the capital cost of building an entire USA-wide network from scratch.
Did someone at the NSA trip over that cable on the floor?
I heard Obama is all in for CISA.
One has to wonder how much of this is possibly true...
Obama Obama Obama Obama Obama.
The DOD 'reinvented', so to speak, the Internet to provide a 'secure' version for their information, or so I've heard.
It's like that line in Contact: "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"
Our tax dollars built it, and we can't even play on it. (And I heard several countries have already hacked it too. Anyone surprised?)
Boy, that would be a mess.
We have enough cell towers now, that are each shared by up to a half dozen providers.
Imagine if instead each cell provider put up their own individual tower. The skyline view would be much worse than it already is in some spots.
That's assuming they'd even bother to build their own in many sparsely populated areas. In much of this huge country, it makes more sense to share leased towers and even pay for shared backhaul.
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What do you suggest to increase the bandwidth and gain better speeds? This is going to have to address sooner or later.
PLUS a lot of the towers around here, and elsewhere I'm sure, were originally owned/used by the older radio companies that deployed such antique technologies as radio pagers, and FCC licensed two-way radios.
There was an infrastructure there, and the background was already in place as the towers were built by an erecting company, sold to a 'holding company', and then paid for by the rental, or lease fees over time.
One of our smaller local communities actually built a tower of their own, and got into the business of leasing it to make money as the tax base wasn't there for them. They reportedly made a pretty good chunk of money off the tower lease fees, and it being there, and the rates being 'affordable' has kept other towers out of their area.
Yet the whole 'they should own their own towers' idea runs up in to the NIMBY folks that passed an ordinance here that forbids new tower construction, and we suffer with crappy signal, and the city has radio problems. The 'geniuses' also passed a tax cap, and it's starving the city and outlying areas. But then...
The tower prohibition has forced them to get creative by placing more cellular antennas on buildings and high tension power towers, but, sadly, there aren't any of those near enough to give us a better signal.
A lot of churches have done well leasing antenna space in their steeples, making upward of $30,000 a year. (Caveat: they lose tax-free status for the portion of building or revenue they lease.)
Churches are often situated nearly perfectly for cellular sites. They tend to be in high density areas, on hilltops, and have a steeple/tower high enough to be seen from a great distance.
Killer thing is that the same people that passed the tower restriction are the same that forced a zoning ordinance forbidding tall structures out this way. As a result, nothing short of a tower, and probably a couple of them, will be able to provide coverage for this area. There are no tall structures anywhere here, and we get 1 to 2 bars, with zero in the house.
There is a point where NIMBY really bites the buttocks...