'Towers down' AT&T Excuse

[thetexan]

Does anyone else think AT&T is telling people that there are towers down just to get them to shutup?

I called our business rep (we have about 25 iPhone 4 and another 20 or so 3GS users in our company and I'm the IT guy in charge of employee phones) about constant employee complaints about dropped calls with the iPhone 4. He immediately went into excuse mode, and he stated that multiple towers were down in the area and they're working on it.

I've seen numerous threads here where people who call into AT&T or speak to their store reps here the "towers down" excuse almost right away.

For fun I called AT&T about one of our phones for an employee who lives about 80 miles from the office (she works out of her home) and complained to the customer service rep about dropped calls. Right away she stated there are towers down in her area and once that issue is fixed things will return to normal. The reason I'm not believing the excuse is this rep didn't even have time to look up any tower outage information or trouble ticket information for that area. Anytime I speak with tech support for my ISP, AT&T T1, cable, etc when they look up outage information it takes them a few moments to pull up that information.

I've placed a call to my business rep and asked him to send me detailed information about the "tower outages" in my area, including how many towers are down, how long they've been down, and their ETR on fixing them. I'm curious to see if he will deliver. In the mean time so far six of my iPhone 4 employees are telling me they want a new phone. What a pain. /rant

 

[chriskzoo]

You entrusted business communications to a completely new product on Day 1 without first giving it some time in the wild to ensure it's reliability?

Just asking..you know, from a "rational way to operate a business" perspective.

 

[STEVESKI07]

That's why most business people use blackberry's. Switch your employees over to a phone that is built primarily for business users and you won't have problems. The iPhone is mainly a media device that they are trying to adapt to be useful in the business world, but it is still far behind blackberrys in terms of being an excellent business phone.

 

[thetexan]

You entrusted business communications to a completely new product on Day 1 without first giving it some time in the wild to ensure it's reliability?

Just asking..you know, from a "rational way to operate a business" perspective.

Sadly enough I have no control, like most IT departments it seems. Whatever phone the employees want, the employees get, as long as it's ActiveSync capable.

 

[Telecacher]

For fun I called AT&T about one of our phones for an employee who lives about 80 miles from the office

Thats your idea of fun? Seriously, get out more.

 

[chriskzoo]

Sadly enough I have no control, like most IT departments it seems. Whatever phone the employees want, the employees get, as long as it's ActiveSync capable.

1) AT&T is giving you A BS excuse
2) Most IT depts. have TOO MUCH control, in my experience
3) You should approach the information managers at your work explain that it's impossible for an IT department to be expected to support any handset an employee wants to buy - let alone have to troubleshoot the network for each provider if service is poor. Standarsize on a phone - employees will get over it.