Cingular Experiencing Massive Network Problems?

[Mike Temporale]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://theinq.net/?article=24491' target='_blank'>http://theinq.net/?article=24491</a><br /><br /></div><i>"It seems that Cingular has a massive US-wide problem with their network, or in their parlance, a feature. This new feature, one that they don't charge extra for, yet, makes it impossible for you to get inbound calls, they just drop to voice mail. ...Well, Cingular, when confronted admitted it has a problem, and if you spend an hour on the phone with them, it can correct this one, manually, one at a time. Sigh. It won't tell you about it unless you call first, it is nationwide and from what I gather, irregular. If you are on Cingular, I would heartily recommend you check if your inbound works a couple of times a day until it comes clean on this one, if it ever does."</i><br /><br />Well, this is the first I've heard of anyone complaining about network problems. Maybe it's just an isolated incident? Is anyone else having network problems with Cingular?

[Jerry Raia]

This happens with all carriers. I remember it happening when I was on Verizon from time to time. If it is something that can be corrected as the author states then that is another matter.

[edgar]

My cingular (blue/AT&amp;T) is rock solid. I don't know if Washington DC just has good service or what. I was Cell One previously here about 12 years ago, when AT&amp;T bought them it stayed solid.

No problems here at all except around the CIA and NSA Headquaters - gee is that a coincidence?

[stevew]

I'm in Florida and I couldn't surf the internet with GPRS but no problem with calls.

[c230-k]

If anyone's even paying attention, Cingular service in the Southern California region is awful. You have to dial into voicemail multiple times a day to check and see if you've recieved a call or not. You can have 5 bars and the phone won't even ring and then a hour later a voicemail indicator comes one saying you have a voicemail. The service sucks here and Cingular is making excuses and wont admit that they have network issues here. I have 6 friends that all have Cingular service and are saying the say thing. Sometimes,my friends and I are standing around and try to call one another and the phones don't even ring, just to voicemail it goes. We are frustrated at their lies and cover ups of the service issues. I will now be complaining to the California PUC and the FCC and make a formal complaint on the service condition that they are charging me $39.99 and the service at times can't even be used to recieve calls. :evil: I have complained multiple times and have been given no credit for my troubles. They are going to loose customers if they don't do something with their network. Which by the way is Tmobile, as they had to sell the spectrum to Tmobile prior to the meger of At&amp;t due to FCC requirements and have a agreement for 4 years to buy wholesale minutes from Tmobile and let cingular users use the system.

[Jerry Raia]

I must be living in an alternate universe. I fly up and down the California coast constantly and my Cingular service is no different than my Verizon service was. I miss calls at the same rate that was the case with Verizon. Should it be better? Of course. Is it worse? Not in my experience so far.

[Kris Kumar]

I have missed calls on T-Mobile network. :-( The cell phone shows 4 or 5 bars and there is no GPRS activity. Yet the phone does not ring and it goes straight to voicemail and then I get the SMS message, informing me that there is a voicemail. :roll: And I do not live in a big city.

[PeterLake]

Is there any reliability to anecdotal stories such as these? The author even starts his story in the first-person personal: "CINGULAR IS A SINGULARLY AWFUL phone company, but then again, I am a little biased." Note to author: expressly acknowledging your bias does not make your article more objective.

If I were to act on this news item, I can see myself switching to another carrier only to read and perhaps experience the same sorts of problems.

Is there any hard data on the company with the best coverage and lowest drops? Is it broken down by geographic region -- or at least MY geographic region? Now that is something I would consider.

[surfer]

I've got a sister who is currently residing in the US and using Cingular and she does not have this problem in Flordia. I've have aswell called her and i've been calling from her phone several times and have never experienced this problem. Shes currently thinks that Cingular works better then her swedish operator called 'comviq'.

[nskgti]

Just a heads up...

This article on engadget has no official sources. It was posted because some customer service rep said they were having network issues. Internally at Cingular there are NO national issues on the network dash board..

Here in NYC, I haven't had any issues other than the rare (3 in 15 months) dropped call.

[Mike Temporale]

This article on engadget has no official sources. It was posted because some customer service rep said they were having network issues. Internally at Cingular there are NO national issues on the network dash board..

Sounds like you work for Cingular. If that is the case, I guess you should know. ;) Seeing as nobody else has responded complaining of the same problems that the author was having, I was coming to the conclusion that this was not a nation-wide issue. Thanks for clarifying. 8)

(Oh and the article wasn't from engadget ;) )

[dbob]

No apparent problem here in the Greater Boston area - other than certain dead spots.

[Rocco Augusto]

i wouldn't say this is a huge problem with cingular, i would say it is an annoying problem with ALL carriers though. i work for a company that sells phones for 4 of the big 5 and at least once a week someone will come in with a phone that has all calls forwarded to voicemail. there isn't once carrier that has it happen more than the other though.

90% of the time though it is due to the fault of the customer. without realizing it a lot of people setup call forwarding on their phones. this mostly happens to new cell phone users who just get finger happy playing with new toys. i see this a lot in motorola vXXX series phones especially the 551 on cingular (we sell alot of those).

its usually a quick fix even when its the networks fault. 5 minutes on the phone is usually all it takes to get the switches back in order. it happens. is annoying? yea, of course it is but it usually can get fixed really quickly.

also for users that have phones and the calls just go straight to voicemail even with 5 bars it might not be the carriers fault at all, you might just have a crappy phone. just because you have 5 bars doesn't mean your phone will ring when someone calls. cellphones are like everything else, you get what you pay for ;)

i have a friend that comes over to my house all the time. he has a samsung x427, i live in a area where we get great service and he always has 4-5 bars. he can be standing right next to me and someone can call and his phone will go to voicemail 1/3 times. if he puts his sim in my 5600 or mpx220 when i had that he would always get all his calls. does it suck that the phone isn't up to par? sure it does, but what do you except from a free phone? sometimes free or cheap isn't always a good thing.

-opti-

[jk47]

I live in the Philadelphia area and I've been having this problem for a few months. I have full bars all over my house but my phone doesn't always ring, I'll just get a voicemail notice. I'll have to call them and see what's going on...

[nskgti]

I live in the Philadelphia area and I've been having this problem for a few months. I have full bars all over my house but my phone doesn't always ring, I'll just get a voicemail notice. I'll have to call them and see what's going on...

What phone are you using?

I'm not going to say people aren't having problems entirely, but they seem to be isolated... Many of the people I've heard having the issue are using non-Cingular and often non-850 phones.

I would call care and just see what they suggest...

[Damion Chaplin]

My girlfriend and I are constantly experiencing this (we're on the family plan). Either:

The phone tells me I have a voice mail when the phone never rang

The phone rings once and then goes to voice mail

The phone rings, but I can't answer it for whatever reason, and it takes UP TO 2 HOURS for my phone to register that someone left a message. This means my girl can call me to ask me to pick something up in the city before I leave and I won't get the message until after I get home. :(

I called Cingular to ask them to figure it out and their short answer was 'congestion'. They did admit that they get these kinds of calls all the time. I told them that I live in the SF Bay area and that if 'congestion' was the problem, then they've got a REALLY big problem on their hands. There are thousands of Cingular customers in this area. They admitted that they were experiencing problems on the west coast for 2 weeks or so. I told them I'd been experiencing it for about 2 years (about the time I added my girlfriend to my plan). They basically had nothing they could tell me except that if I continued to experience the problem I should call back. :roll: Yeah, right.

Cingular definitely sucks, but I've yet to hear of a carrier that offers perfect service... (No one I know is fully satisfied with their carrier).

Oh yeah, and my phone is a SMT5600. Cingular-branded and definitely 850.

[JackmanL]

Due to Southern California’s difficult to cover topography and environmentalists’ “not in my backyard” aversion to new cell sites, I am forced to use both Verizon and Cingular. Overall, I find Cingular a better value and more useful but Verizon seems to have better coverage in outlying areas. However, both equally suffer from the problem of calls going directly to voice mail while in an area of strong signal strength. Most often, I become aware of the problem when I receive voice mail notification upon moving from one cell to another after being stationary for a period of time. I have communicated this issue to both Verizon and Cingular on several occasions without resolve. I would be interested in learning what others were told by their carriers and if they were able to resolve similar problems.

[Tamad]

Maybe it IS a regional thing. I, too, am in Southern California and I get more calls that go to voice mail than completed calls. This is often when my wife (one digit away on the network) and I are in some large store &amp; trying to locate each other. I've used Cingular for over 5 years, but the problem has recently become much more prevalent.

[muzzin]

My wife and I have had similar problems, if not all those of the Imperium999, Quoted below. We live south of Detroit and I travel all over the Detroit area. There is no doubt they have a problem. Yes at times we accidentally turn off our ringers or are in bad cell zomes but without questions there are many times we simply get no ring, get short rung (2 or less rings), get VM immediately after talking to someone and they call back after the first call is over.

We've used every service before except Sprint and T-mobile. Cingular's coverage is mediocre. Verizon is best. AT&amp;T was really good. TOo bad CIngular has failed to capitalize on the AT&amp;T quality network coverage and service.

I'm convinced the drop call and coverage issues are related to the conversion from the AT&amp;T system. There is likely also some 3G trial and error going on that is influencing the quality.

Hopefully the cost to access VM and dropped calls costs will go away soon.

I thik it might be time to move to Verizon again, assuming they are first to market with true broadband at a reasonable price. ...........Yeah right!

-Fred




My girlfriend and I are constantly experiencing this (we're on the family plan). Either:

The phone tells me I have a voice mail when the phone never rang

The phone rings once and then goes to voice mail

The phone rings, but I can't answer it for whatever reason, and it takes UP TO 2 HOURS for my phone to register that someone left a message. This means my girl can call me to ask me to pick something up in the city before I leave and I won't get the message until after I get home. :(

[Infarct]

I dunno, I have Cingular service on my old AT&amp;T plan in NY and it works rather nicely. And when I was in SoCal, I still had great service. In fact it was so good, that even when my phone said it was roaming, they didn't charge me for it.....

/still waiting for that big bill to arrive with a "corrected amount," even though it was 4 months ago.