The “Break it Down” Blog

AT&T invented illegal wiretapping, monopolies and crushing corporate power, but what they also bring to the table is exclusive rights to Apple’s much-desired iPhone.

When the iPhone was first announced on the AT&T network, I still remember the following response from a group of friends about 20-strong:

• 50% – Sweet! I’m getting one!
• 50% – Nice phone, there is no way I’m moving to the AT&T network.

By the time the refreshed 3G iPhone came out, I didn’t hear as many nay-sayers dissing the AT&T network, but I know all my friends that had wanted the phone really bad but refused to get on the network, simply Unlocked their phones onto other networks (like T-Mobile).

Well fast forward a year or more after the 3G iPhone launched on the AT&T’s much-advertised “fastest network ever” and let’s see what those friends are saying. This one is from a friend in Phoenix:

Anyone else having major AT&T issues over the last month? As in..

* Having full bars and 3G but neither being able to make nor receive calls. “Call Failed” on the iPhone over and over.
* Outgoing calls being completely silent and requiring a retry.
* Voicemails taking 4+ hours to be delivered.
* SMS taking for freaking ever sometimes.

nice… I think I’d throw my phone through the wall if that were happening. We get to find out the signal strength read-out on the phone is not so much a technical read-out of the signal strength, but a variable display of whatever the network provider wants you to think the connection strength is.

See if the bars were low all the time, you’d call and bitch about poor coverage… if they get it to display full bars all the time, BUT the phone doesn’t work at all… well that’s just a fluke, and you can’t call customer support because they’ll just ignore you.

See how the corporate mind works? Problem solved!

And another friend in San Francisco:

No, but the 3G is super slow pretty much everywhere in san francisco.

And another friend across the country in Chicago:

YES!

All of the above.

The SMS and Voicemails are REALLY killing me. For example, I’ll have full
bars of 3G, someone calls and my phone doesn’t ring. They leave a VM but I
don’t get a notification for 4-6 hours.

Also, trying to send an SMS, it will hang like 80% of the way through,
timeout, and then I have to re-send like 5x to get it to work. Secondarily,
I’ll get some people’s SMS message like 10x in a row. WTF!

This all has been in the last month.

I’m curious if other folks out there are seeing similar behavior? I’ve always heard comments similar to this about AT&T’s network, basically amounting to the fact that in busy markets they oversell their service and don’t provide enough antenna to service all those people comfortably… but god knows you have full bars so it’s got to be your fault, right?