Tales From The Ipe! » at&t

Apple Genius Bar says iPhones’ 30% call drop is “normal” in New York

Joel — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:24:46 +0000

I don’t have an iPhone, but I know AT&T’s service can be pretty wonky. Gizmodo reported that one of their readers was getting around 22% of his calls dropped in the NYC area, and took it to Apple. The Geniuses said this was pretty good. Apparently, a 30 percent dropped call rate is the average in NYC for AT&T.

What?

BlackBerry Bold Visual Voicemail now available?

Joel — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:16:22 +0000

What’s this bit of news that I stumbled on? Visual Voicemail for the BlackBerry Bold is now up? I want to go to there. Has anyone tried this? Do I need to wait until Tuesday? Will it cost anything? I love new technologies and capabilities, but I have so many questions.

http://gizmodo.com/5343799/blackberry-bold-visual-voicemail-feature-now-live-os-drops-tuesday

What is up with AT&T’s wireless service?

Joel — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:50:49 +0000

I’ve noticed in the past 6-12 months (not exactly sure of timeline) that my AT&T wireless service has been getting very hinkey. When I say “hinkey”, I mean you can have a full set of bars, but no response or very slow. In the past two months, a number of bloggers are complaining about their 3G coverage, especially while using their respective iPhone 3Gs. If you’re trying to make a phone call, browse the internet, or attemping to download updates (a la Facebook), you could be fine one second, and then kaput.

The blogosphere (the bloggerati?) are pointing the finger at all the iPhone 3G phones (with all the other 3G phones) eating up so much AT&T network bandwith, it’s effectively creating a network slowdown. It would certainly explain a lot. I remember way back in the 1998 – 2001 time period, I signed up for my first cell phone (a Nokia) through AT&T Wireless. The service was acceptable initially, but a few years later, the reliability of their analog service degraded. Funny, that was the problem back then, and it was just analog for phone calls.

Back then, one of my cousins told me to stick with AT&T Wireless, as he heard they were going to build new towers, but it never improved over the next few months. Eventually, that prompted me to first move to T-Mobile, then Verizon Wireless a few years after that. In 2007, I came back to AT&T for the nice selection of BlackBerry smartphones. Unfortunately, I have come back full circle, and am now experiencing data network issues. Where am I going after this? Nowhere. I’m here with AT&T for the long-term.

BTW, this is interesting. What with all the different cellular communications technologies we’ve had, check out this graph with how the technologies have converged so far, and will continue to converge in the U.S. towards this LTE-A standard. Neat. Does that mean all of our cell phones will be interchangeable between carriers in a few years?

A Day in the Life of 3G – PC World

Joel — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:45:17 +0000

Saw this article by chance. PC World spent a day testing 3G services in 13 cities across the U.S. Big surprise, Verizon offered the best all-around service. AT&T? Not so hot. Again, big surprise. Man, I’m never going to hear the end of it from my Verizon friends.

Full article: A Day in the Life of 3G – PC World

Chart: 3G Speed and Reliability Results by City

PC World: AT&T Plans to Double 3G Speeds

Joel — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:55:54 +0000

This is pretty interesting news for AT&T customers. AT&T is doubling the download capacity of its HSPA 3G network, upping the speeds from 3.6 Mbps to 7.2 Mbps for 3G devices. HSPA+ will be rolled out nationwide later this year.

Ooooh, aaaaaaah.